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Microsoft To Start Running Anti-Unix Ads
PhreakinPenguin writes: "According to this article on News.com, Microsoft and Unisys are preparing to pay for a slew of ads to 'undermine' Unix with the theme of 'We have the way out.' They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap. One ad states, 'No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever.' Unisys is apparently putting up $25 million and Microsoft won't say how much they're chipping in but you can bet it's more than Unisys." As the article notes, this comes after floundering attempts to sell (through Dell, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard) the high-end Unisys machines pushed by these ads.
Doesn't Microsoft already own enough of the world? You think they could leave UNIX geeks alone.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Nice business practices, MS. You'd think you could prove that your product is superior through example, not slander. If these ads are half as bad as they seem, I say IBM starts making commercials full of BSoD's and says explicitly: "You will never see a blue screen of death with Unix".
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
MS can crow all they want that Unix is hard to use - and I might have thought so, until I used OS X. Great GUI (needs some tweaking, but hell, what doesn't), start ssh, ftp, and Apache with a click of the mouse, and you can go configure the .conf files if you want - or if you don't want.
Yes, Unix is inflexible. That's why open source Linux runs on nearly every piece of hardware you can find. I use it for my Day Job web/general Unix servers, running on cheap desktops or expensive rack mount units.
Consultants are expensive. I can actually go out and buy a book on Unix, then look at the source code of FreeBSD, Linux, Darwin - and change things myself. Oh, good god, adduser is so hard to figure out.
Oh, yeah. Unix is so hard. Especially when those blue screens of death pop up that interfere with my work or those proprietary API's that I can't get all the info to, and - oh wait. Unix doesn't have that.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It shouldn't take IBM, et al, long to start running ads that show an MS-only shop having all the boxes go down simultaneously. Then, the CIO goes looking for who can get things fixed, he can only find clowns in the IT department saying "maybe we should just hit all the reset buttons." Maybe dressing the fools up like clowns would make the point that much better.
*sigh* Everyone knows you get what you pay for. Expensive employees generally pull their weight. A clown that only knows MS products isn't much better than a trained monkey.
Of course, I think MS has a place in businesses--just like *nix. Companies really should diversify their operationing systems so that they can take full advantages of each. MS Win2K just isn't as good of a webserver, for example, as many of the *nixes. And a Win2K Server is nice for tying together a bunch of Windows workstations. Exploit the advantages of each.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I wonder, does this kind of ad really works?
I thought that it was generally believed that everyone immediately sees through "we-will-help-you-get-away-from-evil-competitor" ads. Giving the viewer the completely wrong impressions.
But on the other hand, Unisys and Microsoft. They are not exactly known for caring what the customer thinks as long as they pay.
The thing that struck me most was this concept of "expensive experts." I could easily see them expanding this campaign by inserting adjectives like "condescending", "difficult to communicate with", "obnoxious", and even "completely other, alien, and kinda creepy." These are all representative of the impression regular folks seem to have of the sysadmin, from what I can tell. As opposed to the impression of your average MS-savvy (love those two words together) "computer guy" who helps get you back on the network or shows you where your downloads go.
Maybe the bearded ones need a PR campaign.
:wq
For Microsoft to build a campaign against UNIX would be like Coke or Pepsi promoting a campaign against the evils of water.
UNIX is the backbone of the Internet. It started with university and military computers, and is still based on these technologies. It has spawned many successful clones and variants, including BSD, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and many more. And virtually ALL of these versions work well together and can exchange code.
Not that this is surprising, but Microsoft is arrogant to point of giving the finger to God. This is really a sign is disrespect for everything built over the years by the blood, sweat and tears of the first network pioneers.
Unisys sounds like it has little to lose since it's been sitting on its corporate butt so long that even the oldest of us have forgotten what they've recently done in the computing world.
I'm not making a righteous stand for just the UNIX world. Microsoft is really a company with poor ethical practices and should be recognized as such.
Microsoft could have it all by realizing that practically all its major competitors have a UNIX base in their OS, even Apple. Instead of fighting the UNIX family, they could cash in simply and easily by moving the Windows NT/XP base to a true UNIX base, and create (the usual closed-source) apps in UNIX versions that can be compiled for virtually every UNIX family OS. (Not that everyone would want the apps, but at least it would be there..)
But NOOOOOO...
I was ranting on how OSS was too disorganized to fight MS in certain market attacks--that OSS lacks a defined leader. This instance is an exception. There are plenty of corporate makers and users of UNIX who might jump on the big MS "screw you" bandwagon and even pump up some cash in the corporate and legal system to get MS to shut their corporate pie hole.
Pissing off the U.S. Government is one thing. Pissing off other big businesses is quite another.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I think Microsoft has begun to learn a little about high end computing. Remember a few years ago when all the trade rags were writing Unix obit, claiming MS was going to eat their lunch with cheap high end WinTel boxes (of course, MS [like any other company] were feeding this line of bull to everyone).
Well it looks like MS have learned there's a reason that high end, rock solid industrial strength computing isn't cheap. You can't just bung Windows on commodity hardware and expect it to 24/7. So the advantage that MS had at the departmental level in the past (cheaper and easier to use than its competitors, lest we forget that that was a major selling point of Windows in the 90s) it doesn't have on the high end. Unix is entrentched and competative price wise. MS are going to have a VERY HARD time eeking out market share at the high end. They'll have some successes, but the world will not be running on MS Big Iron any time soon (if ever)
Do you people honestly expect them to cheerlead for unix. They are a business for crissake and unix is their arh-nemesis.
And advertising does work. That is the only way for people to know you exist (at least in a competetive commercial environment).
Here's the problem with that. Sun's marketting budget is nothing compared to that of MS. They can do a few adds but IBM has the big bucks to do an add war.
Don't forget last year, when MS sent out those "public service announcements" that touted the expiration date of NetWare! Novell was pissed about that, and got the ads pulled. (Rumor has it that NetWare 6 is the last one, but you didn't hear that from me.)
This ad campaign will probably backfire on them. Most smart IT people have had enough dealings with MS in the past to recognize marketing FUD when they see it.
I've adminned for several years in very diverse-OS environments (NT, 2000, NetWare, Unix, OS2, etc.) If (and only if) you truly know about the inner guts of NT/2000, you can build stable, secure environments with it. I've had uptimes of a year or so (not the norm, but it does happen!) Lots of "experts" think they're NT/2K wizards because it's got the same GUI that their desktop does. I've gone into environments with NT/2000 boxes several service packs out of date, missing all the security fixes, etc.
MS's ads state that Unix vendors lock you in. They do, but they're at least a little more reasonable than they have been in the past. Windows' main strength in this regard is that if you hate your server vendor, you can fire him and get a new server. Sun makes you buy Sun hardware. So does HP. Linux and freeBSD are some of the only remaining Intel choices, and most businesses aren't ready to give up tech support and easy availability of consulting help yet. MS also mentions expensive experts. Yes, Unix admins are expensive, but MS is probably assuming that its half-a-million MCSEs are all experts. As a holder of that certification, I can tell you that this is a falsehood. Even the MCSE/2K exams were easier than I had hoped they would be. You get what you pay for, as always!
At the risk of losing some Karma, wasn't it on this very site where I saw an ad at the top of the page depicting a giant penguin terrorizing Redmond? If the topic here is a company trashing a competing OS in their ads, it bears noting that this coin has two sides.
A series of short shots of a number of people saying, "I believe in Unix." While this could include big companies which buy unix hardware, the add should also have these people: Jobs, McNeally, new guy at IBM, Linus. It'd be fun.
It requires you to pay for expensive experts.
And the other side of that coin is, "If you get an MCSE, we're busy telling your boss that you should work cheap." How long can they get away with screwing over the people who support their products?
Nope, no sig
If you aren't doing the patches (which require reboots), then I don't want to think about how vulnerable your machines are.
Bill Joy bashes Microsoft.
What did you expect? Ads from Ford promoting Chevy? Burger King touting Big Macs? Its business, and business is war. Get over it.
meh.
Holdon a minit. You could also say:
c ertification.
"You get what you pay for and our organization (who shall remain anonymous) hired four MCSE's that ultimately cost us many times what a well-trained administrator familiar with MICROSOFT PRODUCTS would have cost us."
There really isn't anything Unix can do that Microsoft can't anymore...This is right up there with arguing Protestants vs. Catholics. (But THAT would have less religios fervor.)
A Paper MCSE is worth the same as a paper CNE or a paper whatever-the-heck-Redhat-was-calling-their-Linux-
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Businesses don't look to the long run because of a change that happen to the corperate world in the late 70's and early 80's. That change was the concept of 'shareholder value'. Buisnesses used to build their strategies and plans based on providing and acctual service or product, but today (and this ran rampent during the 90's dotcom explosion) they focus on producing money for their stock holders rather that products for a community. When your entire buisness plan is 'how do we make the most money the quickest, all else be damned?' it makes trying to convince your stockholders that doing anything which will pay off in five or ten years (rather than five or ten months) is a good thing. If the choices are a quick buck now, or a solid buisness latter, the quick buck will always win because it increases shareholder value.
This is a very dangerous strategy for Microsoft. Imagine that some PHB takes the ad seriously and starts checking to see what the costs are in their computing environment and what the "lock-in" issues are?
Gartner and other places will tell that PHB that Windows costs *more* than UNIX (licensing, support). And we all know about the "lock-in" of Windows software (*cough* Office, exchange, etc.) and file formats.
I think that anyone that does a serious analysis of the claims in the ad will come away with the opposite view than Microsoft wants them to have.
It really hurts when I see that Linux gains marketshare from other UNIX variants; it should be gaining from Windows, not from its brethren. This may endanger the viability of UNIX as a whole (investemnts made by companies like Sun, HP, IBM) and is not good news.
Don't feel bad--if Linux wasn't taking their marketshare, Windows would be. The unix market's is going through a little consolidation behind the flag of linux. Prior to linux's emergence, the unix sectors biggest problem (and strength) was the multiplicity of different (seemingly) incompatible solutions. Of course, POSIX and the OPEN group emerged to fight this off, but their business models couldn't last against WINTEL--they had more expensive software and hardware, no desktop to speak of, poor options for commodity peripheral support, difficulty to configure, and to top it all off, management all own stock in MS.
Now, the proprietary unix vendors are enriching linux and offering a "linux strategy" in order to stay alive. But, as a result, more people than ever are using unix-like OSes. Once there is hegemony behind the diversity that is linux, look for linux desktop shares to encroach on Microsoft--at least to the level that Mac's do.
In my estimation, what's happening now is much like what went on in the early days of Islam. You had a bunch of fearsome barbaric nomadic tribes (unix) roaming around in the desert attacking each other. Mohammed (Linus) came along and united them under the the flag of Islam (Linux), after which they created an empire that covered the half of the known world, and creating one of the most advanced civilizations of its time (My computer once most mainstream games are available on linux).
I can't believe anyone actually took you seriously.
If patches are released weekly, then shouldn't you be patching your servers that often? Even if you test the patches on another server for a week, you're still doing it weekly, right?
Are your servers patched?
What's your company's name? Server IPs?
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Thank you.
Businessess don't look to the long run because manager's bonuses are tied to quarterly profits.
My company recently wanted to set up an in-house paging system. We decided to save some bucks and roll our own system using *nix. Our only specified requirement that was not met was that we spend a bit more and get pagers with better reception (lots of concrete where we are).
The pagers had to be purchased using the operations budget for Plant Operations.
The director of Plant Operations has one of his quarterly bonuses tied directly to fundage left over in that pot at the end of the quarter.
Guess who decided to buy $2.95 refurb numeric-only pagers?
Our paging system doesn't work now cuz we went with cheap pagers.
We're (the company) are now paying more to revamp the system in the long run than we would have in the short run if we had went with the pricier pagers in the first place.
Guess who doesn't care cuz he's already got his bonus?