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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.
If you're talking about an older version of UNIX tied to a specific vendor, Microsoft MAY have a point... but the little secret that Microsoft doesn't want you know is that Unix in general is becoming more open-source AND is becoming more of a commodity rather than a specific that runs only on specific hardware.
I guess what I'm saying is that Unix is losing more and more market share to operating systems like Linux. (Linux is NOT unix, although it's quite similar) This is especially true administrators (rather than corporate commitees) get to pick the operating system to use.
A good case in point is the market share and mind share of Solaris and Linux. Sun Microsystems just recently released the source code of Solaris under a "community license" (which is NOT the same thing as GPL, but it's the best we can expect from Sun Microsystems). Did Sun have to release the source code? Not really. But it knows it would lose MORE mind share to Linux if it didn't.
Netcraft says:
The site www.wehavethewayout.com is running Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD.
Let's have a poll on this subject. Who can name the MS products that have produced the smallest revenue compared to the money that MS invested in development and marketing. Two of the biggest money pits at MS have been:
(1) Windows DataCenter. This product has thoroughly bombed. Last year it was rumored that only a couple dozen had made it out the door.
(2) MS BizTalk Server. Another "MS Enterprise" computing product that despite _immense_ marketing spend, is really sucking ass.
MS is doing this marketing campaign because their enterprise computing strategies have thus far fallen off a cliff. This is just more money thrown to the wind. People aren't buying MS enterprise computing product.
Oh, and give aways like IE don't count for this poll.
There really isn't anything Unix can do that Microsoft can't anymore
What?!??!? This is a troll right? Have you ever spent any time with computationally intensive work? I'm talking calculations that take hours, days, weeks. Even W2k, while improved cannot work with 4GB or more of RAM, crunch on an algorhithm for two or three days, and not have problems. Hell the W98 box I replaced with our W2k 2.2Ghz box would crash multiple times a day.
The SGI Octane on the other hand can work for weeks at a time on a calculation and still be able to respond to queries, launch new processes etc... without ever becoming unstable. My OSX box (while not as fast as the Octane and not as much RAM as the Octane) will crunch happily on problems while letting me write papers in Word, surf the web, serve web pages, download new data and allow me to examine it, and plug in a Firewire hard drive to upload data to ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!! The W2k Dell box chokes badly every time attempting this sort of thing and there is no way you can say that Windows can compete here.
As for your argument about well-trained administrators familiar with MICROSOFT PRODUCTS. That's what we thought we were getting and paying for. The point is that Microsoft products are third rate. They don't scale, they are not as stable as other offerings, they do NOT have the same flexibility versus UNIX, and the ease of use of the OSX flavor of UNIX is unbeatable. This is the problem with people that have been raised on Microsofts nipple. They don't know anything else and they make assumptions about the rest of the computer world without having the appropriate knowledge. Try using other environments before saying that Microsoft can do anything UNIX can do.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, I reproduced it. Simplicity itself, actually.
Just run the irdaping command provided by your favorite Linux distro while there's a Win2K system in range. Whatever it sends so horribly confuses the irda.sys program in Win2K that it crashes the whole system.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In short retort:
It's all about the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Microsoft's firm belief that the decision makers in a company are the ones in air so rarified as to know little enough about technology to be brought in to Microsoft's folds by this bunch of crap.
Kevin Fox