@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
salesman would be presented as a "solution engineer"
This is usual marketing stuff, ridiculous to me, but some buyers buy this, so marketing use this.
But it is not important for our subject.
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
So now the question becomes... how much IT work does someone do in position X before they are classified as a buyer or hirer of IT rather than IT themselves?
I see "managing" and "actual work" as two different things.
(But all managers also do both things - the higher you are in business hierarchy, more time you need to have for managing, less remains for "actual work")
To me "Managing Sales" and "doing Sales" are both part of Sales.
Also "Managing IT" and "doing IT" are both parts of IT.
And to me, it can be fine that manager is "buyer", but that does not mean he cannot be excellent at his job.
Of course, if IT manager doesn't understand IT, makes bad decisions.. than he is bad manager (not competent etc.)
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
IT's primary value is in evaluating options, often an insanely broad range of them in loads of highly disparate arenas, and taking into account all the tech stuff, and applying all of the applicable business stuff, and making a decision as to all kinds of things that might involve.. buying software, hiring programmers for bespoke software, buying hardware, how a network is designed, who is hired, where they work, and on and on.
It seems to me that IT is just different (than examples in my prevoius post) because it is hard to find person who understand business needs and have deep knowledge of various IT solutions available in various IT fields as SAM described in this quote.
Interesting topic.
But it seems to me that we need to clarify definition of the term "IT manager" to agree on answer to SAM's questions.
I don't understand why "buyer" is not IT, and "doer" is IT (if SAM is trying to say that)
To me, it seems logical that (in SMB) IT manager is buyer, not "engineer"
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
the buyer would claim to be an "IT Manager" or "Director of IT" and the salesman would be presented as a "solution engineer" and all the people doing any actual IT are just nameless bodies somewhere behind the scenes. To me, this isn't "doing IT" or "working in IT" any more than sending your secretary out to buy you lunch makes them a chef.
I'll try to compare this to other departments:
@FATeknollogee Linux Mint (Mate or Cinnamon)
@WrCombs Dell P2419H (or any other Dell P series)
Adjustable height and left-right rotation.
Very good stand.
Affordable price
You can even rotate it 90 degrees if you want "portrait" picture instead of "landscape"
@scottalanmiller I am not questioning your consistency. My company uses on on prem servers because of both, unreliable internet, and calculations similar to yours in this thread.
I was just wandering whether something has changed in your view or not.
You are mentioning on prem here, not colo. I was not asking about cloud, so cloud != off prem does not mean anything here.
@scottalanmiller I think you wrote that you "hate anything on prem" in some old thread. What have changed in the meantime?
@JasGot In my company, we use XCP-ng on 4 small hosts with maybe 10 VMs on them (2 Win RDP servers, few Linux fileservers...). We manage them with XCP-ng center (Windows app) in LAN and with Xen Orchestra remotely. We are very satisfied with XCP and management is pretty simple. We are no experts but beginners.
We cloned some VMs, copied them from host to host, added additoinal storage after installation...
I tried to install KVM few times and I find it confusing to setup and manage.
@manxam Thank you! Thats it. We use Bitdefender.
We have weird issue that when we add some devices to our Meshcentral 2 server, we also get unknown device called "michael-7-x64" added to the same group.
We had that issues few times so far, not always.
We removed "michael-7-x64" few times, and it came back again together with adding new device.
Now we still have "michael-7-x64" in our mesh.
Does anyone else have similar problem, and do you know why it happens?
@Dashrender I have not looked at it as an anti-piracy solution - Good point
@Dashrender said in Free Upgrade to Windows 10 in 2019 from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1:
I wonder - does this also mean that Cisco's iOS is transferable? As I understand it - the licensing for Cisco gear state that the OS on said gear does not transfer to the new (secondary, etc) owner of a device. That this non first owner must purchase the software themselves to legally use it.
Scott - or anyone - know if that's still the case?
That cannot be the case in EU.
And that is huge driving factor for moving more and more licensing from perpetual to subscription based licensing, just as @scottalanmiller mentioned for Office 365
@Dashrender said in Free Upgrade to Windows 10 in 2019 from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1:
I supposed I can understand that. Though when it comes to VL - MS doesn't really have a transfer mechanism, so I'm not sure how you go about transferring those licenses to another owner.
I suppose I can understand that. 
But that is then technical problem for MS. As I heard, people did not have problems with activating VL licenses (and they can be split also)
@JaredBusch said in The Fundamental Flaw in Not Listening to the Boss:
Source of ideas, potentially. But they also have no idea what makes sense to the business itself, as they have zero insight into the business as a whole.
Agree, but as I said, most companies fail to survive. And not understanding your own business is main reason for it.
But, here we usually promote "best practices" in IT, so I think we should talk about best practices in management too - not just what "most folks do"
@scottalanmiller said in Free Upgrade to Windows 10 in 2019 from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1:
That should mean that the original seller (OEM) can sell it to anyone, too. lol
I'm not sure, because the "first sale" did not occur yet.
The judgement of Court of Justice of EU said this:
"An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the
use of his programs downloaded from the internet
The exclusive right of distribution of a copy of a computer program covered by such a licence is
exhausted on its first sale"
This is the quoted document/judgement that made precedence in this matter (the case of UsedSoft Gmbh vs Oracle corp.):
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf
@scottalanmiller said in The Fundamental Flaw in Not Listening to the Boss:
Why even hire advisers that you don't listen to?
Well, that is obvious to probably everybody.
But what is less obvious to bad managers, is that employees who are not formal advisers, who are at the bottom of business hierarchy are excellent source of ideas for improvement of business processes. I am talking about all business segments, not just IT.
If you do not use that resources you are wasting them and you are bad manager.