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Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1
geekinexile writes "Bloomberg is running this Microsoft vs. Linux article as a top story on the Bloomberg system. Not so notable for what it says about Linux, but rather for the fact that the financial community is starting to actually get open source."
this story is not only on Bloomberg's website. It is on the Bloomberg system as one of the top stories when you do news research on Microsoft.
From the quote, it sounds like when they say "Unix", they are talking about the proprietary Unixes. (Is that the correct plural?) That's probably a true enough statement; Windows really is cheaper, as is the commodity x86 hardware. (Of course, this is ignoring the elusive "TCO" argument, which is smoke and mirrors to the point that you can prove any price differential you want.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Let's see 2002 - 40 = 1962.
Wow, All this time I thought Multics was in the late 60's and the first Unix came in November of 71.
Guess journalism and math don't mix.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Like my company was. However that being said, what got me to finally breakdown and switch to Linux/Solaris wasn't the Nonexistent Security, Monopoly, the consistant Patches, the piss poor support or even the high cost. It was when trying to get my Exchange Server back up after it crashed for no apparent reason a book I was reading for help in running Exchange said:
"It is often preferable to simply backup you Exchange Server Data and reinstall, instead of trying to find the one hidden setting that is causing the error in your configuration."
That almost made me fall over in my chair.
From that day on I decided on a course for MS freedom. We now run Apache/Tomcat for our JSP server, MySQL for our DB Backend (until migration to Oracle is complete), and QMail/Horde/IMP for mail. It took a little time but saved around $6000 in software licensing costs and $5000 in new hardware that would have needed to be purchased.
So in the end I could deal with all the MS shit until the UI for managing Exchange got so bad it no longer became worth it to run MS on the server side. It was the best IT decision I've made (IMHO).
He's probably looking at "total cost of ownership" numbers. These include support costs, training costs, etc. I've seen some TCO numbers recently that suggest otherwise (that GNU/Linux actually has a cheaper TCO than Windows), but that's part of the nature of this sort of "number".
A number appears to be an objective measurement, but the method of arriving at the number is subject to much fiddling. I don't think that TCO will ever be settled because it's witchcraft. MS would obviously prefer to avoid licensing costs as a measurement of "cost". TCO gives them a chance to claim that GNU/Linux is actually more expensive.
It might be wrong, it might not. Look for the source of TCO studies and try to decide who to trust as an objective judge. Even that has problems.
Basically, the short answer is that MS is touting TCO rather than licensing costs. TCO is a gordian knot. The truth could well go either way for all I know.
As far as our shop goes, we like free software for the beer and the freedom, and since we are GNU/Linux-based, TCO would work against MS anyway. Hard to tell what the case would be if we were MS-based.
guac-foo
Lots of petrified grits
Check out http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Gandhi
Whoops, got my religious nut cases mixed up there. Thanks for the correction.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You guys need to understand there is no such thing as "reliable enough" on Wall Street.
I think one of the appeals of Linux on Wall Street is that they see down the road it could potentially run on their mainframes as well, to allow a common platform across the board. Of course this is 5+ years down the road, Linux is not even close to commercial Unix RAS features, let alone mainframe, and it lags Windows comfort on the desktop. But it is moving in both those directions, so for those niches where it works now, it makes sense to go that way rather than put in something else that'll require a tougher migration down the road.
The current Wall Street cost consciousness will fade once the market and economy start kicking again, but that reason is why Linux will still be making inroads on Wall Street.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Below is a snip of an article from today's NYT. It appears that plenty of people suffer from cognitive dissonance. The more they invest in MS products, the more reluctant they will be to walk away from them. Maybe it's the same phenomenon that sees people buying a Lexus or Audi instead of a Toyota or Jetta. Until they lose their really good papers BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP... they'll keep signing up for more MS stuff in shiny plastic-wrapped packages.
Microsoft Sales and Profit Rise
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:21 p.m. ET
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) said on Thursday first-quarter earnings more than doubled, topping cautious Wall Street estimates, as revenues surged on a new software licensing plan.
At a time when a slowdown on technology spending by companies has weighed on profits and shares, the world's largest software maker also raised its full-year revenue and earnings outlook.
Advertisement
Shares in Microsoft rose sharply in after-hours trade, gaining more than 4 percent to $53.16, from a close of $50.77 on the Nasdaq.
``I think this was a gangbuster quarter,'' said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Charles Di Bona. ``There is just really exceptional strength there.''
Boosted by new subscription-style licensing that encourages corporate customers to pay yearly fees for software, net income was $2.73 billion, or 50 cents per share in the quarter ended Sept. 30.
Or, you could do what Canada also does, provide some immigrants with all the benefits of citizenship and support of Canadian society with little of the responsibility or even the requirement to work for what they get, taking money from existing citizens through high taxes to feed those fleeing far less supportive cultures. There is nothing wrong with welcoming immigrants, but there is definitely a lot wrong with giving anyone a free ride on the backs of hardworking Canadians, immigrants or not.
What Canada do you come from? Have you ever tried to immigrate to Canada? My best friend just married a French guy with a master's in Economics, and he has been in the immigration process for the last year. Trust me, there is no way that someone can just immigrate to Canada and live off of social services. Both my best friend (who was born in Canada) AND her husband had to sign documents stated that they cannot go on any form of social assistance for the next TEN YEARS.
I suggest you do a research into your own countries policies before you go off on your xenophobic rants.
How about the creation of TUX? The webserver that runs in kernel space and drastically enhances the speed of serving static content? And although not recently, but in the past the invention of the TCP/IP stack was due to Unix, as well as almost all of the every day internet protocols like POP, SMTP, FTP, etc. And although I don't recall exactly but wasn't the C programming language invented to write Unix? The Linux and Unix community have contributed many innovations (although most are probably from the Unix side of the camp) compared to Microsoft.
Linux, according to Netcraft. But then, when I tried to go there, it was down. Maybe that's part of Ballmer's cunning plan...
Microsoft makes about 60% of its revenue from sales outside the USA. So international markets are extremely important to them, especially when they need "new" markets because they already own 95% of the existing markets.
cpeterso
I really wish I could agree with you, but I can't.
In 1995 I worked at one of the companies that produced a very high quality TCP/IP package for Windows. It wasn't cheap, but it was rock solid, high performance, and had a lot of features not found in Window's current sockets implementation. For example, if you were writing a network app, you could fire up a debugging tool and watch all the network calls, or get a packet trace. We never viewed ourselves as being in competition with Microsoft... but they did.
So they eliminated all of us. That is, they told all the TCP/IP vendors that they were going to start considering wsock32.dll part of the OS, and if they found a different one than the one they shipped, they'd automatically remove it and replace it with their own.
Even if you are making no effort to compete with Microsoft, if one day they decide that you ARE competing with them (whether you're a business, a religion, a culture, or an ideal), then they will bring to bear everything that they can think of, every power play, every tactic, every strategy, every trick, dirty and otherwise, to take your head off, cut off your air supply, knife your baby, and eliminate you as a threat.
Perhaps the culture and belief system of Open Source is strong enough to withstand the Microsoft onslaught. I sure hope so. In any event, I can tell you from experience that there will be an onslaught, and it won't be a little one. 40 billion dollars is a lot of money.
"China" doesn't have a long history of ignoring IP right, the citizen have a long history of ignoring IP rights. Piracy in China is still illegal, and the citizen know that very well, but there are simply too many people.
A few years ago, you could buy pirated software and CDs nearly everywhere. If you go to China now, you'll see that most of those dealers are gone (or at least hidden in dark, small places).
Well its seems that pepole in general are starting to open their eyes for the possibilities in opensource. Although, like some of you have already mentioned, its not necessarily the superiority of Open Source software as much aas it is prices for MS products that is turning the tide.
In Denmark there are trial runs for all the regional councils to change all their public services onto open source machines, completely dropping MS products. Although there are soem technicalities about reliability, the millions of $ that are to be saved has made almost every politican there a supporter of the open source environment.
-.sig sauer-