Start IT business in Poland

I know this has been covered in an earlier post but the information in that post wasnt exactly what i wanted.

I am a highly experienced IT Consultant and have been working for myself as an IT Contractor for some time now. I would like to start an IT business in Warsaw catering for the small to medium enterprise, primarily supporting the Microsoft product platform.

I realise there will be a degree of market research required but some of the more rudimentary questions are:

Is there room in the market for another IT Solutions Provider??

Would my lack of Polish be a hindrance?? (I do intend to employ one engineer to begin with)

Thanks.

I'm not sure if Microsoft is very popular in Poland; people use Linux now as it's for free. What would you exactly be doing as a consultant?

I realise that demand for MS products isnt quite as high as for the open source stuff for the obvious reason......COST!!

That said MS have now opened a centre of operations in Poland and i daresay MS and its marketing machine will manage to make some headway. Personally as a consultant i would look to implement IT solutions from the ground up, Mail, File, Print, Security, Mobile etc etc. This would typically be for small to medium enterprise but i do have on my CV some of the major government and financial organisations here in the UK.

I would say there are a lot of other reasons why the opensource is better. Much, much, much better.

And, yes, I'm linux user.

I'm C++/DBA a programmer from Poland and the truth is M$ products are CHEAPER than OpenSource ones. Why? Because most of the people using computers, not only here, have no fu$#% idea how to use Linux! Almost all professionals here use Windows, I'd just say - Photoshop, 3DSMAX, Visual Studio, ASP.NET, .doc files, Outlook, MS Exchange, MSSQL etc. etc. It's much easier and cheaper to buy licence than to train all the staff.

Actually WINDOWS is INCREDIBLY POPULAR in Poland. Illegal versions, but who cares? Even Bill don't.

And BTW - the programmers in Microsoft Warsaw are probably the best payed in this country. Same MSSQL admins. Actually I do know a lot of programmers and over 90% of them write soft for MS OS. Yeah, maybe they are cool haxorz uzing Linuxz, but what?

Angry Duck - I don't think OpenSource stuff is much better. Many programs really are, many are just worse copies of commercial soft.

I'm also using Linux from time to time (last Slack and security distros, recently BackTrack, can't wait for full v3) but have never found any better OS for home/office use than Windows. Even if the OS was pretty easy to use like Ubuntu - the support was 10x worse than with MS. I'm not talking about device problems only, but about support on forums too. Maybe some people like to Google for 2 hours or wait 3 days for reply if have unexpected problem with sound card (like I had), but as You can see - 90% of people don't. And there's nothing wrong.

polishmaster, in my opinion, for those having tasted open source, there is no dilemma. It's like hell and heaven comparison. Well documented, good community (size depends of popularity however, but still you'll find enough smart geeks able and willing to help you-no matter what distro you choose) cross platforms, etc etc.

But I can agree with you (and can understand other people): closed/proprietary source is something most are familiar with. Learning them to use open source, oh yes, it could cost a lot of. Mental energy, as a first.

Must be true, I belive.
Luckily I am here with a company who has just one single machine with Windows :) (used for running some proprietry conference s/w). Each and every other task (except conference :) is done on machines running linux. I myself am using linux for the last 4 year and pretty satisfied.
These programmers are not hackers :), some of the best you can meet and working on products (yes linux based) which will revolutionize the market. (slight exaggeration only ;O)

Actually people are used to windows that anything else looks strange and imperfect which is not true.
Consider replacing a front line actor (read windows) from a long running television drama, however good the replacement (read linux) may be, ppl are bound to feel the transitions "shocks". (weird analogy :)