Linux Advocacy Advise

[Ed Allen]

I really believe that over 50% of the medium and large business 
population has serious misgivings about Microsoft. I believe that most 
of them also believe their business cannot live without Microsoft. So 
maybe the best advocacy policy is something like this: 

   1.Understand that a single advocacy session will not cause a 
   transition, and that any transition will be long and thoroughly 
   planned. 

   2.Understand that not every business will make the transition. Resist 
   the temptation to enumerate the disasters that will occur from 
   staying with Microsoft. There are other companies out there who will 
   be more receptive to your message -- spend your advocacy time with 
   them. 

   3.Encourage the business person to articulate his/her misgivings 
   about Microsoft. 

   4.Emotionlessly shed further light on those misgivings, with examples 

   5.Encourage the business person to articulate his/her dependence on 
   Microsoft. 

   6.Without calling the person wrong, suggest Open Source alternatives 
   to accomplish the EXACT TASKS the business person wants to do. 
   Accompany those with URL's that A BUSINESS PERSON can read to learn 
   more. 

   7.Answer "objection" type questions with a workable alternative, 
   never doom and gloom predictions nor insults. If you can't think of a 
   workable alternative, "let me get back to you on that" is just fine, 
   as long as you try to get back to him or her :-). 

   8.Learn more about the company. 

   9.Put yourself in the shoes of the business person before answering 
   the question. 

Here's a tough series of legitimate objections that a business person 
might bring up: 

     We have many programmer years of code that runs on a Windows 
     desktop. 

     We have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in our existing 
     Windows software licenses. 

     Microsoft won't continue to give us such favorable licensing if we 
     bring any Linux into the corporation. 

     We use the UltraCFO accounting package, and it won't interoperate 
     with non-Windows clients. 

     We have hundreds of clerks and bookkeepers. The cost to retrain 
     them would be prohibitive. 

     Our vendors and customers all use Windows. We need to interoperate 
     with them. 

These are all very serious concerns. The skillful Linux advocate will 
neither brush them off, nor attempt to solve them with technological 
solutions that don't address business needs. The skillful Linux advocate 
will attempt to find real ways in which these concerns can be
defused, to the extent possible. 

http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200104/200104.htm#_linuxlog
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    Linux - the Unix defragmentation tool