Slashdot Mirror
Meet Martin Taylor Of Microsoft's Open Source Test Lab
securitas writes "Martin Taylor was recently appointed as Microsoft's open source and Linux strategist and is responsible for Microsoft's open source and Linux test lab, mentioned on Slashdot last week. Taylor says his goal is to change Microsoft's competitive strategy by pursuing a fact-based approach instead of continuing the previous discredit-and-undermine strategy that was characterized by calling open source and Linux software 'a cancer, un-American and bankrupt' among other things. Taylor says he plans to focus on (and fund) studies that 'will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership.'"
Fact-based UNIX Debunking. Why confuse the argument by trying to have it match reality?
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Martin Taylor is actually a revolutionary new AI developed by Microsoft. He'll be a part of Windows 2005 if everything goes smoothly. Think of him as Microsoft Bob's grandson.
I see into... the future... I see this "lab" only producing... whitepapers where Microsoft.... wins!
Whoa. There's a surprise.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
this is what they should have done in the first place. The best way to win customers is to earn them -- show them that your product is better than the competition. You'd think, with billions of dollars, a standing army of support personnel, and a solid customer base, they'd focus on making their products better and more reliable rather than trying to push their monopoly around. I hope some excellent upgrades and fixes to MS software come out of this.
--My other sig is a ferrari.
I find it funny that Microsoft is actualy going to attack linux by learning it. They still have a strangle hold on the market, I don't even understand why they're going after linux as a 'competator' but hey everyone wants to rule the world right?
I am full of goo... black evil goo
If Martin Taylor the guitarist knows he's got
an evil alter ego at MS?
siggy played guitar
Taylor says he plans to focus on (and fund) studies that 'will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership.'
So in other words, completely unbiased and perfectly objective studies that people can trust to give an accurate picture of Microsoft products.
I mean, I don't necesarilly trust OSS-sympathetc studies... but that doesn't mean I'll swallow MS propaganda whole.
no thanks
Though I'm sure their "new approach" will still contain a fair measure of FUD, actually hearing factual arguments from MS will be a nice change of pace. I respect arguments based on fact, even if I disagree with them.
That Microsoft telling the truth about security would pretty much boil down to: "Please, don't buy our product."
Okay, enough M$ bashing. So what DOES Microsoft do right?
Well, okay, they have developed a pretty reasonable method for getting patches and security fixes out the door. They do so for free (as in prostitutes) and though they could have completely shut out Apple's MS Office line, they continue to develop it.
Apple and Red Hat both have competing systems to the Windows Update schema, and I have to say I like Apple's better. I haven't had much interaction with Red Hat's. Anyone?
Open Office I'm really really really really hoping goes Quartz native soon, but according to this posting it's not likely do to API updates. *sigh*
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Fact: XP runs faster than RH9.0
Untold: the XP was running on a 3GHz P4 w/ 512MB and the RH9.0 was on a 400MHz P2 with 256MB of RAM
Fact: MS OS'es have less bugs than Linux
Untold: Because one bug in SSH counts at least 15 times -- once per distro.
Fact: MS is more secure than Linux
Untold: The MS box tested was fully patched, running NO services, was connected to an ISA firewall...and to no other computer. They'll also forget to mention that the machine wasn't turned on.
Fact-based campaign. Will half-truths be considered facts?
If you read the article, Open Source Initiative President Eric Raymond was the one who said that Microsoft's previous strategy was claiming Linux was a "cancer." Taylor never used those words and never suggested that was Microsoft's previous strategy, as the headline suggests.
All Taylor admits is that previously Microsoft had defaulted to an "emotional" argument, and that now they are switching to a "fact-based" one, whatever that means.
The only reason I'm correcting the submitter here is that it makes no sense to put words in people's mouth, even if you hate them. It is counter-productive to legitimate debate and argument.
Taylor says he plans to focus on (and fund) studies that 'will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security
Microsoft announced today that they are laying off a Mr. Marting Taylor, citing the fact that he had no work to do.
Taylor, head of Microsoft Linux Open Source Test Lab, said today 'fact-based studies focusing on areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership.' conclusively prove:
Linux is 'a cancer, un-American and bankrupt', among other things.
Microsoft: Same cr*p, different way.
It's bloody hard to compete against free software and I'm actually amazed to see them try this approach instead of their usual media contamination methods.
Of course, I don't hope they win as I think Windows stinks (you can pry my OS X from my cold, dead fingers) but kudos to them for playing fairly for once.
I hope your joking and I'm wasting my time, but if not...
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
Gee, I wonder if their TCO study calculations will include the cost of worms and virii(?) that only affect Windows platforms/outlook/IE? Every time a new worm comes along I wonder if people realize the hidden TCO costs that sticking with MS incurs.
Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt
Translation:
"The open source license is not open, becuase you can't take it and ever use it in a job-creating activity at Microsoft "
One of the best features of open source, is its ability to melt away unnecessary expenditures of money on software not directly related to the business goals or your company. It is inconceivable that any right-headed CIO or CFO would spend penny one on a "Word Processor", for example. The ONLY company that this decision would hurt is Microsoft. A company frees up virtually 100% of their software dollars to hire real, local software developers to develop solutions to their own, personal, business problems.
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
thats gonna be a short and empty studie
Not so sure for now. For example, ActiveDirectory has many features that are currently lacking in open source implimentations, including multimaster replication. And network administration in a server/client network is easier with Windows, I think.
Also, security is a fact of product design, not of coding methods, so people still use Sendmail despite its monolithic architecture, and the fact that a security hole causes *root* compromise. Microsoft is not that much worse than many open source products. And you can expect them to pick on industry standards such as BIND and Sendmail. As well as making unfair generalizations.
But Microsoft is losing ground FAST. In the end, there is no way I see them winning.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I know quite a few Microsoft people who are quite knowledgable about Linux and open source software (some of whom contribute to open source projects in their spare time, etc), who are quite capable of rational discussion on the topic of open vs. closed source, and why it's good for customers to use MS products. If MS starts attacking open source software on rational grounds, they certainly have the resources to do so effectively. And in the world of technology, such an approach might be more successful than their emotion-based attacks.
After all, it's been fairly easy for open source advocates to discredit Microsoft's initial relatively incoherent ramblings; "cancer" and "communism" type name calling did more to discredit MS than their opponents. So while MS' FUD attacks were dangerous because there was a lot of money/press behind them, they were ultimately unproductive.
If MS can make a solid, businesslike case that MS soutions are better than open source that's likely to carry more weight. Imagine, for example, if there were a credible, objective study that showed that (to make up a hypothetical scenario) the total TCO for Windows 2003 as measured in production is lower than Linux, or the application development costs are lower using Windows and the associated frameworks, that'll at least allow them to retain current corporate customers, and perhaps even go back to growing enterprise marketshare.
I think that even though MS competing more effectively makes everyone's else's lives harder, ultimately a shift towards civilized debate is good for the industry. In business settings, Open Source must be able to win on objective, pragmatic merits, not just on principles. Winning on both principles and pragmatics makes open source unstoppable. If the competition reveals weak points in the open source arguments, that's _good_ because that means that they can be addressed, and everyone wins.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
And I thought MY job sucked. ;)
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
is the real father.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
subject asks it all.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I disagree. I think that IBM (who is credited with getting Linux a green light from Homeland Defense) has plenty of money to setup a fact finding group for Linux. I know you may hate to think of Big Blue as a "Linux company" but they have pretty much bet their server business on it.
This could be a good thing - it gives open source developers a change to observe and plug any weaknesses. While MS examines and reports on the weaknesses of OS solutions, take note and don't get angry - get coding!
My rights don't need management.
coined by some guy I can't remember
Gene Amdahl.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
The back of my old Linux Hardware Solutions t-shirt has the following quote from Ghandi next to the penguin:
First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
I'd say Microsoft has now reached the third line regarding Linux. This is a good sign.
Jan. 31, 2001 Wired: Microsoft thinks Linux is doomed, and predicts that many Linux businesses will falter and fail before the end of the year.
I agree, except I'd expect Microsoft to deal with Linux on a couple of different fronts. I mean, what company out there uses the totally honest approach? Everybody does what is in their power to keep customers.
.NET, Server 2003 seem to steps in the right direction. Linux probably hasn't hurt this effort.
Early on they could deal with Linux via FUD (although I'd argue there was a good deal of FUD flung from both sides.) Now they are going to start investigating other methods, heck maybe down the line offer Office for Linux? Who really knows? Would it kill Microsoft to offer a version of Linux, as well as keep the Windows platform if the future requires it? I mean, say Linux grabs 20-30% of the market. Microsoft is extremely big and powerful company with a lot of smart people and could offer a good distribution. So they'd have to decide between their ego and their bank account.
Microsoft has always been able to deal with changes in the market, and this is one of them. How fast they change depends on adoption of Linux.
I'd also say the MS platform has been moving along well -
Of course, maybe this is all a dream and they'll never touch linux. The future is exciting!
Fact was a nice word, I'll miss it. But no matter, we still have the teeshirt:
Front side
picture: Iraqi minister of communications
caption: "there are no Americans in Iraq"
Back side
picture: his Billness
caption: "there are no bugs in Microsoft software"
...they only use Microsoft(c)(R)(tm)-compatible facts. After all, you can't trust just any old fact, can you? What good is a fact if it hasn't been centrally acknowledged by a competent corporation? It needs to be passed as Factually-Uniform Documentation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Gene Amdahl
Who used to work for IBM, then founded his own high-end computer corporation, getting a large number of government contracts. He is also the person who discovered Amdahl's law, which applies to the amount of speedup accomplished by parallel computing.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
Linux didn't do that well in the comparison.
So what did the kernel developers do? Did they give up? Did they all mail their resumes to Redmond? No, they improved the SMP performance of the kernel, so that by the time 2.4 shipped, it could beat Windows 2000 - and I imagine XP now too - in similar benchmarks.
I don't doubt that Microsoft is going to find lots of things that Windows does better than Linux does. That will serve as a guide, to help the Free Software community set their priorities as to which problems to focus on first.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Honestly, and flame me if you will (/. comments have always been themed with "down with microsoft") but this sort of stuff is what my boss looks at. And his boss looks at. But here is my take.
"Will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership."
Secuirty
No OS (Linux, Unix, BSD, Windows, ect) is secure by default. There are always exploits and holes. Yes MS has a bigger % of security incidents then other OS's because its used more. There are other reasons but take into the consideration that the more people that use software, the more bugs and holes will be found. Im not saying Microsoft is anywhere near secure out of the box as *nix is (because that would ludicrios) but they DO fix thier holes, which is really want counts isnt it?
Feature-completeness
Many of us think about MS OFfice, and Windows to be overloaded with features that we will never use. There is alot of junk there, but at some point someone had asked for that junk. I could see MS giving themselves a pretty high rating for this.
TCO
How easy is it to install and configure a MS server, how many more people are trained to do it? How many more MCSE's are there than Red Hat Certified people? I have seen them use this tatic before; The OS may be free, but whats it costing you to keep a person that is Linux qualified versus the people you already have that are MS qualified.
The whitepaper's that come out of this may be enough for my boss (or his boss) to stick with his windows 2000 running cold fusion when I am just starting to warm his feet in the linux world.
Bash MS all you want but they DO have a way of looking good in the executives eyes. Not to mention there is no centeral place to get TCO information on Linux. Yes, you can go to RedHat.com or any of the other distros and get thier TCO report but all of thier numbers are different. This makes it confusing for bosses everywhere, Microsoft.com is trusted to them, they will see Microsoft.com as the numbers that are most likley true, then where will linux be?
Microsoft is going to have to start establishing a long term track record of having rational discussions and doing things right. At this point, most people associate Microsoft with that company that wrote the thing they use at work the reboots on them and gets slow. They MIGHT have heard about how they were judged a monopoly. Go a little higher to the technical manager level, and they might know about a few of the highly embarassing things that have happened to Microsoft like the lawsuits or the navy ship getting towed back to shore that was running NT, etc. The prevailing attitude has been:
"We have to like it. It's the only choice".
Or for the more hardcore fans,
"we have to love it and defend it because they have all the money and power and I always side with the winner because that's all I know to do. I am afraid of change".
And even though that gets them what they want in the end, market domination, not many people actually take them seriously. I can remember being at a coffee shop recently and 3 older, more mature looking suits were joking about how Microsoft was getting "more secure" and remarking on a outlook trojan problem they were having currently. Nobody buys it. They just have accepted that they have no choice. That's why a effort like this, no matter how much money they throw behind it, won't convince too many people. It will create some really great boilerplate for the zealots to recite. That's about it. They are going to have to actually make their products better and actually work very hard to clean up their public image before anybody takes anything like this seriously. Just look at the general body of the responses to this article already! If Linus submitted a story saying he was going to do some sort of security audit, he would pretty much universally be taken seriously. You'll never have that with Microsoft given the reputation they have forged for themselves. Windows Server 2003 is a good step in the RIGHT direction for once. It's the smartest thing they've done to DATE to combat Linux in any way. Why? They actually listened to what their customers wanted, and sorta did it instead of doing what THEY deemed right and push it on everyone. It actually looks to be a decent product. But, it doesn't help that Oracle put out their July/August 2003 magazine and there is a HUGE Penguin on the front cover. Pages 46-62 can be summed up like this:
"Get redhat and a dell and oracle9 or you are stupid."
They might as well have said:
"SCO is completely batshit. This is what you want to do now".
And they basically came out and said
"Federal Aviation Air Traffic and Control, as well as these hospitals are now running Oracle on Redhat on HP and Dell servers. We are now meeting the holy grail of reliability with Linux. You can trust it with your life, and the lives of your loved ones".
The message is pretty clear for any CIO or manager type that I've shown this issue to. With the momentum behind Linux at the moment, I don't see Microsoft being able to do much of anything to lower their TCO in time. Every time a CIO, CEO, VP, etc. hears about all the money Amazon have saved, They want some of that luvin.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I think the main reason for this is because it already has, it's just that the dopey and the terminally stupid have failed to notice it.
Can I quote you a for-example? This is a bloke called Christopher Dawkins who runs his whole school (Felstead, in Essex) on Linux desktops. Kim Perkins, who runs his entire school (Strathcona, in Melbourne) on Linux fat clients, would say pretty much the same thing. And of course neither Munich or Largo would be of a mind to disagree with them:
Get it? Got it? Oh, never mind...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is typical arguing from the conclusions. They already know what they want to find; now it is just a matter of crafting the studies that will find exactly that, not the reality.
But why be serious?
Like being so incredibly complex no one can properly manage permissions, hiding information so no one can actually understand what's going on, and making it nearly impossible to log stuff? Not to mention hiding source code so it can't possibly be audited? Now, that's security for me...
Like there will be a Microsoft Debian distribution with everything and the kitchen sink installable from CDs or network servers, following a coherent policy? Wow... can't wait for that... will take too long!
Like no more incredibly expensive MSCE that cost even more by always choosing the most inefficient solution? No more incredibly complex, expensive licensing that charges double for Terminal Server usage? Suddenly MS SysAdmins will be as efficient as their Unix counterparts? Toto, we're not in Kansas...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
He is also the person who discovered Amdahl's law
Wow, what are the chances of that?
*ducks*
c-hack.com |
The way for Microsoft to compete with Linux is for Microsoft to stop being adversarial toward its customers.
For example, Windows XP has a crippled file system that cannot copy some of its own files. The purpose of the crippling is apparently to prevent copying. So, customers have to use third-party tools that often don't work well to make full backups of the boot partition. Because some people are pirates, Microsoft has chosen to treat every customer as a criminal. This causes customer a lot of lost time. When the backup tools don't work well, it causes customers grief.
The last time I mentioned this particular adversarial behavior toward customers, someone posted a comment saying it was not true, the Windows XP file system CAN copy all of its own files. However, Microsoft employees have often said that it is true. Sometimes Microsoft employees even suggest one of the third-party tools.
Microsoft recently declared that operating systems have a very limited lifetime, and that Windows 98 is dead. Windows 98 is the most commonly used operating system in the world! Now all of those hundreds of millions of people must suffer. Apparently Microsoft wants to force people to upgrade to Windows XP. However, many of those customers have computers that are not powerful enough to support Windows XP. Anything for money is the philosophy at Microsoft, I guess. If Bill Gates wanted to be truly philanthropic, he would make a good operating system and support it well.
These are not isolated circumstances. There are many ways that Microsoft is adversarial toward its customers. Bill Gates is the Chief of Grief.
But hey, Open Source is not always positive toward its customers. I reported a but in Mozilla on a Sunday at 8 AM, and got a message at about 10 AM saying they doubted that the problem was a fault in Mozilla. I asked for a new feature in another program, but the developer said it would have to wait until the next major version. So, open source developers are not angels; some of them are however, about the best people you will find on earth.
You'd think that a gargantuan behemoth like MS would think "who cares about some snivelling little toy OS like Linux". But you'd be wrong. Remember, a young, nobody upstart (MS and DOS) shoved aside the top dog (DR and CP/M) not by being richer, or smarter, or faster, or better, but by being more alert. Gary Kildall was semi-unavailable and/or not that interested in talking with IBM, and Gates and Allen were very available and interested, and here we all are.
MS sees this whole Bazaar/Cathedral thing and it makes sense -- faster updates, more solid code, thousands of eyes, etc. It's a lot of alertness (and is thus a threat), plus it's got that magic word: FREE. But the whole premise of Bill G's life is that software should not be free -- that was his major contribution to the old Homebrew Computer Club, where everyone freely traded/borrowed (??AAs would say "stole") software. Thus, MS's dilemma: how to beat someone at their own game, when their game is completely contrary to all the rules they live by.
For further (this time, actually good) reading about MS and Linux, see this. For another possible reason MS wants to get inside Linux's head, see this -- a.k.a. "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I am getting really sick of surveys and studies that start with the answer, then search for the question. How about doing some unbiased research, then after studying the results, announcing the results and maybe inferring a conclusion or two?
I wish the press just wouldn't cover these kinds of publicity stunts. Next week: Gartner advises world to buy Microsoft because of results of microsoft funded, microsoft staffed antiopensource lab research findings...
-- $G
Of course, the cynic in me says that the outward looking will be focused on this particular lab only, and that the rest of the "bang your chest and think your'e the best" will not budge. Time will tell, I hope.
Anonymous, since I long ago forgot my password.
Surely if Microsoft does the research and points out 'facts' this will just give GNU/Linux developers a checklist of things to squash. The arms race that this will produce can only be good for GNU/Linux and ultimately backfire (again) on Microsoft. _Almost_ as good as free kernel patches from Redmond....
Yep, it's spreading, now even MS has it.
> You can't fix what is not broken.
Your faith that Linux is perfect is touching, truly.
I don't think many of the kernel development team would agree with you. If they did, surely they'd be putting their feet up and sitting back to watch their perfect creation slowly take over the world.
Any criticism of Linux that emerges from this lab can be addressed by its developers and users. Simply saying that any criticism that is levelled at Linux must be a lie because Linux doesn't need improving is dogmatic nonsense.
He's certainly not going to win a Pullet Surprise like that.