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MS Struggles to Discredit Linux
PrimeNumber writes "The Register has this interesting story about a supposedly "leaked" email from Microsoft Windows division VP Brian Valentine. Although half of it is admittedly suit/rah rah speak, the interesting nuggets mention use of Microsofts "Sun and Linux insiders"."
The whole email is pretty funny actually.
The tone of the message seems to suggest that he knew it possibly would be leaked. The wording seems to carefully step around anything suggesting Linux is evil, but suggests that he considers Linux the alternate operating system competitor that it is, sort of like Coke vs. Pepsi...
What especially rings my "hoax/troll bell" is the last couple of lines about the message being "Microsoft Confidential" and how he can track any and all forwards. Give me a break.
This article is complete bull. Nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise. It was written by a well-intentioned Linux advocate and sent to The Register because it would give the people of Slashdot a reason to cheer.
Nothing to see here, folks. These are not the e-mails you're looking for. Move along.
This email looks a lot to me like he wrote it and it was released intentionally as some type of stupid PR thing...
i hate pansy republicans
It's ironic that Microsoft is getting a dose of its own medicine. The IT department (which existed pre-PC) tried to get everybody to use their centrally managed platform, but people just kept buying those darn PCs running Microsoft software.
Well, that aside, I wouldn't necessarily trust the authenticity of the E-mail. Can Microsoft management be stupid enough to send out mail with big warnings "don't forward this"? Haven't they learned from painful pas experience that if you don't want it to get forwarded, you don't send it by E-mail? At the same time, the content of the E-mail seem in character for Microsoft.
Most plausible about it is the obsessive need by Microsoft to control the whole market and let no competition appear. And that's exactly why Microsoft needs to be reduced in size: there is nothing wrong with having Microsoft be a big player in the market, but there is a lot wrong with any OS or software vendor being the only significant player in its market segment.
Linux is, after all, an extremely expensive operating system. After all, just look at Hewlett Packard, their Linux distribution sells for $3000 retail. When was the last time you saw a copy of Windows XP (and this is a retail copy, not considering the fact that it comes free with most new machines) for $3000? And think of the support costs! Whereas you can drag just about any MCSE off the street who doesn't drool too much and use him to effectively administer an NT network, you need highly intelligent, qualified people 24/7 in order to maintain a Linux installation. And guess what? They don't grow on trees, enough of you ought to know that; they are expensive. Just as with commercial UNIX, it isn't the initial cost that will break you, it is the ongoing support contracts from the vendor that are the most expensive over time.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Theres one important clue here that points to this email as being legitimate. The lack of British euphamisms. The Register is a UK-based resource. If they wanted to doctor up a fake email in a conversational tone, it would have been written differently from the style in which it appears. Infact, when I was reading it, I kept expecting to see language differences, and didn't find any. Hell, to any self-respecting haxx0r, that bad-bad-doggy conclusion at the bottom of the email just begs to be disobeyed.
Even more true is the snippet about DH Brown being total FUD-whores. It says so right on their damn webpage, you can pay for the results you want.. Give em $1M and they'll tell that the majority of people surveyed think the sky is green, Windows is better, and we all ride around on invisible pink unicorns.
Bowie J. Poag
unless they are really stupid.
It's a simple trick - they sent out slightly different copies of the email to everyone on the list. Then, when the public version gets published they can reference the published version against who got what.
The changes can be cosmetic - slight changes in phrasing, additional punctuation, spacing, line breaks. Stuff like this would be pretty much unnoticeable without having a couple of different copies to compare against. Even then, it would likely be tough to notice the difference.
Add in 3 separate requests to "not distribute" as a tempting goad to the leaker, and the odds are that MS has solved their problem with that person.
Unless The Register sliced up the email themselves....
Well, given the history of various MS email leaks, I am inclined to believe it. It is completely plausable that MS would be focused on Linux on the server side. Read the email - that is how marketing/sales thinks. That is the message that all salesmen are told - find out what your customers need, protect your turf, and here is how to discredit your competitors.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
According to a friend of mine that works for Microsoft,
it is as real as the halloween document. Microsoft views
Linux as the only credible opposition that they have.
Sun is a minor problem, not major. Sun is over priced
and will not sell low-cost Linux or BSD. They
want as many lock-ins as Microsoft has,
so Microsoft wins.
Nah, this is a real leak. Look at all that marketing speak.
Check out the part about the consulting company doing a study, comparing the cost of Microsoft solutions to Linux solutions in Unix upgrade costs. There's two possible conclusions to that study. One, Linux could come out on top, and then Microsoft would never release the study. Two, Microsoft would come out on top, and now a Linux company (Red Hat) can proactively do their own study, so that they have something to give to their own marketing people. Even without a "leaked memo", the sales folks could have said "yes, DH Brown is releasing a study in a few months, showing hard numbers that Microsoft is better, I'll get that to you when it comes out, etc. etc.". No real advantage in leaking the memo.
At the same time, I doubt he's really concerned about a leak - there's no real facts in there, just strategy. I imagine the sales team is out there, selling Microsoft products, and complaining to each other that the customer brings up Linux, and they have no ammo to use. This is the boss saying "we've heard the coffee room conversations, we do have a Linux strategy. Here it is. Sell, you beautiful marketers, Sell!".
Now we just need real cost-of-ownship numbers, since you know the DH Brown report will use top consultant by-the-hour numbers...
If he's a knowledgable guy, he knows that tracking the e-mail via Exchange has some serious limitations. Knowing this, why not try to control the problem by making an idle threat? IMHO, he's not necessarily stupid, he just doesn't have any great choices to make here.
Unless he has the message "Canary Traped" This is a fairly well known method of determining where documents are being leaked. Your format the message slightly differently in each case, not enough to change the meaning or even enough that a casual reader will catch it, but enough that each document is unique. You might use a : instead of a ; or leave out a comma or period here or there. By comparing the leaked document to your originals you can figure out who the document was sent to, and therefore who leaked the document.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
I know Microsoft is (and has been) trying to discredit Linux, but this just has the feel of a sham.
The opening paragraph (after the warning) makes me think that the writer is saying "...and don't copy this (wink, wink) because we don't want anyone to know what we are planning (nudge, nudge)."
I'm just not convinced that it came from a Microsoft exec.
I wonder how DH Brown is going to reconcile their anti-Linux FUD and this .
I just installed an "unauthorized" linux box on a K6-233 with a couple of beefy big disks. It serves with Samba, and nobody has even noticed. In fact availability is higher than the NT4 box it replaced due to non-existant frequent reboots on the linux operating system.
The only way anyone would know its Samba is if they look at the server properties, Samba says it is NT 4.5, and the box itself has no monitor or keyboard (try that with Windows LOL) so nobody can log in and run those opengl 3d screensavers and play solitaire any more.
Linux is making serious inroads into corporations. I have personally worked on Linux solutions for companies that you have definitely heard of, and which run a lot of machines. One of those companies has retail stores in every city of the US, and many overseas. Each store has multiple registers and back office systems. All of them are going to be running Linux within the next couple years.
The other company is in the financial industry. You'd think that they have all the money in the world, but they too are implementing Linux solutions in an effort to save money. They took this step SPECIFICALLY based on Amazon's experience with Linux: it saved them a dump truck full of money.
So that's why Microsoft is concerned. The hype is definitely gone. Reality has set in, and Linux is kicking ass.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
We're embarking on several initiatives in 2002 to deal with this.
-
The "99.999%" reliability program will be offered competitively to IT shops which use
only Microsoft software.
-
Presentations to Fortune 1000 clients will emphasize the migration path planned
for Windows XP and its successors, which will move consumers away from a
generic Web environment to one that requires
.NET-enabled web sites.
-
We will be introducing a new mail protocol in 2002 which will replace the
present "SMTP" protocol. This protocol will provide authentication of
mail senders (but not encryption of content) and will protect mail servers
from unauthorized use. The client for this mail protocol will be distributed
as an update to Internet Explorer. Initially, users will see no change
as a result of this action. But when ISPs transition to our replacement
for Post Office Protocol, our mail clients
will treat old-format unauthenticated mail as potentially hostile.
In high-security environments, old-format mail will be down-converted
from HTML to plain text, and attachements will be stripped.
Our intellectual property will prevent the cloning of this mail protocol, giving
us control of the worldwide e-mail system within three years.
-
We are working with PC manufacturers to develop firmware which
enforces a secure boot process.
This will prevent the loading of non-signed operating systems.
While any company will potentially be able to obtain permission
to sign an bootable file, we are working with the National Infrastructure
Protection Center to insure that such authority is only available to
U.S. companies able to qualify for Government security clearances.
With these new initiatives, you should have no trouble convincing top IT management that conversion to an all-Microsoft environment is inevitable."Lots of SSL servers don't run an e-commerce site but are used for an extranet, or for access to internal webmail...
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I mean if I were to tell you that my Windows XP box is more crashy than my Redhat box people would tell me it's a driver problem.
Fact is that both Windows XP and Linux are stable enough to discredit people who say they crash. It's silly, I know, but it's an observation about how people work.
I'll listen to you when you say problems. I'll believe you as much as to help you if you want. But like any rational person I won't give your opinion much weight unless the problem is reproducable.
I'm not a linux bigot, btw, I'm another OS bigot. But that's neither here nor there.
Um, no they aren't. There are absolutely no plans to switch any Sun Cobalt product lines to Sparc/Solaris (and I work in the Cobalt Server Appliance group, so I know of whence I speak =8^} ) There is support from the highest levels within Sun (from Scott and Ed on down) to continue moving forward with Linux-on-x86 as the basis for the Cobalt appliances.
They bought us because they liked the appliance concept. Cobalt is not, and won't be, a general purpose Linux/Unix solution. We play at the edge of the network, providing a front-end to the Sun big iron in the datacenter.
and Microsoft's targets are all non-M$ servers. But they'll have a hard time convincing all but the most naive IT executives with a commissioned "independent" study. I don't know about Sun or HP, but IBM has actual case studies for various industries to back up their sales presentations. And IBM will do an onsite competitive analysis using your actual and projected costs, comparing their offerings against your current environment and the costs of competing vendors. Microsoft better pack a lunch.
However, M$ will still be able to buy some business somehow. I can hear the CTO office conversations now....
"So Mr/Ms M$ sales-droid, why do you think Microsoft offers lower Total Cost of Ownership - that's what TCO means right?
"Well, our higher licensing costs include support that Linux doesn't offer. There is no one firm responsible for Linux - but Microsoft is there for you with support."
"I can buy Linux support for less than your licenses cost.... Why would I want to pay you more for bad service? Licensing terms that say you're not responsible for anything bad that happens to us by using your software, no way no how, never? Support that costs EXTRA, over and above licensing? Tier 1 tech support that needs help getting dressed in the morning? Added charges for Tier 2/3 support? And NOT TO MENTION most of our problems are caused by your own sloppy code, insecure defaults, arcane proprietary system internals, file format incompatibilities! Where is my credit for all these costs?"
"Er, Microsoft makes the best software; everyone uses this."
"Yes, everyone in our offices surfs the 'net, downloads porn and music files, and wastes time chatting online - all well enabled by your promiscuous everything-enabled Windows! And I have a dozen MSCE-papered dweebs running around fixing peoples' self-disabled capabilities to do that instead of work! I can replace that dozen MSCEs with just 2 or 3 Linux people tomorrow. What does that do for your TCO calculations, huh? Do you have any real answer to Linux? I'm very interested."
"Well, we do have some er, confidential partnership offers."
"Is this where you offer me a rather... personal incentive?"
"Um, why yes, now that you mention it. Do you have a non-US bank account by any chance?"
"(Sliding paper over the desk). Well, harumph, having dealt with all my considerations, on balance it's Microsoft here."