Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Rolls Out New Anti-Linux Ad Campaign
Anonymous Coward writes "Microsoft has launched a new ad campaign that purports to give 'objective third-party information' comparing Windows to Linux." See the ad campaign website for more, uh, facts.
Looking at the first PDF file, it says "an IDC Whitepaper Sponsored by Microsoft." Exactly how is a study sponsored by MS considered to be an objective third-party study?
A study of total costs of ownership over five years for working corporate infrastructure shows that lower staffing expenses are a large part of an 11-22% cost advantage for Windows...
Where was Linux in 1998? Not even close to where it is today. If you compared Linux and Windows over the next 5 years, the TCO would favor Linux over Windows hands down.
There was a time not too long ago when Microsoft barely recognized the existence of Linux.
Now they are actively trying to steer customers away from Linux.
To me, that speaks volumes!
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
If MS didn't take Linux seriously, it would not need to pay for such studies. Corporate execs are smart enough to do their own research and will use independent reports to make a decision - just as they do with their hardware, or car buying choices.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
From the "Get the Facts" site:
A study of total costs of ownership over five years for working corporate infrastructure shows that lower staffing expenses are a large part of an 11-22% cost advantage for Windows. For file-server workloads in particular:
Staffing expenses were 33.5% better. Training costs were 32.3% better.
Heh.. translation... Micromonkies are a dime a dozen because they don't actually have to know anything to get their "certification". I'd love to see somebody try to price out a clueful Microtech once. I'm sure the prices aren't too much cheaper than a *nix admin. One time, I actually had to sit and explain how a web server works to one of our "affordable" Microsoft certified admins here. That was probably the most pathetic point in both of our careers...
Another tasty quote from "Get the Facts":
Microsoft-sponsored benchmarks prove...
I don't understand this at all. How can people take this crap seriously? That's like having McDonald's sponsor a study on the overall health value of its food. Are there actually people so monumentally STUPID in this world that they would believe a study sponsored by an organization with a vested interest in a certain outcome? We must find these people and run them down like animals before they breed!
What amazes me most, I believe, is that there really are people that horrendously dumb and, yet, we've managed to evolve to this point.... now these people are managers and they tie our evolution in red tape, so the human race is pretty much fucked from this point on....
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
"Let the dogs bark, Sancho, it's a
sign we're going in the right direction."
"Microsoft-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple WinTel Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator."
This is a pretty fun quote, and implies quite a lot. Note that the "multiple WinTel Web servers" weren't compared to multiple Linux/Intel Web servers, which implies that no matter how the results were fiddled, and no matter what the distribution of Linux used, the benchmarks showed Linux outperformed Windows on Intel hardware.
So instead they compare the Windows setup to a "Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator", because they can't get the results they want, any other way. Why else would they compare apples to oranges, unless there was no way to make the benchmarks favour Microsoft?
Well, IBM is hardly any more objective than Microsoft. They're rooting for an alternative to Microsoft, which makes them just as biased.
A disinterested third party probably don't even exist, but don't pretending IBM is unbiased, and that their whitepapers, etc. aren't filled with marketing bias as well.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they hide is vital.
Everyone knows that if you want objective, unbiased information, you find it in articles at places like Slashdot, ESPECIALLY in the comments after each article.
What's the big deal? A company is making their own products look good. It's not the company's job to give an impartial, or even fair, review of it's own products - it's going to publicize and advertise what makes it look good, and ignore everything else.
Anyone buying a product, including a CTO, should understand this. Are there going to be some dumb CTOs who fall for the hype? Probably.
So what? If Linux *IS* really better, the people who are smart enough to realize it will save a buncha money, and their competitors who don't realize it will be spending a bunch of money, and businesses who run Linux will have a better chance at prevailing. That's what free enterprise is about.
If someone doesn't run Linux, that's no skin off anyone's back but their own. Let them pay for their poor choice and move on with your life.
Unless, of course, Windows DOES have a lower total cost of ownership, in which case if you're a Linux zealot, you might be pissy. But we all know that's not true, right?
paintball
Microsoft outlines three reasons for Windows being cheaper than Linux.
These are:
1.Lower staffing expenses
2.More efficiency per dollar with WinTel than with a Linux Mainframe.
3.Reduced development costs on Windows.
Number one may or may not be true depending on your circumstances. However, it has little to do with the technical performance of Linux and more to do with people's familiarity with Windows over Linux. However, as I'm still downloading the PDFs I can't comment on their sources for this. I will say that if true on the whole, then it is certainly a situation that will change rapidly even over 2004. I will also say that it is very specific to the company involved. There are plenty of companies out there that are more familiar with *NIX than with Windows and for these people the situation would be reversed.
2. I can't comment on this one too easily either until the report is downloaded, but this seems a flawed reason. The summary on the Microsoft report states
--- $40.25 per megabit of throughput per second.
---$1.79 per peak request per second.
I don't know if these are averages of different systems or what, but to give a figure like this, with no comparison figure for the Linux system (or specs on the Linux system, was it Apache, how was it configured etc) is of dubious value. I would have thought that the areas limited by cost on your server were in the bandwidth / network infrastructure against which server speed was unlikely to hold you back. Please also note that these are using Microsoft benchmarks.
3.This is an equally dubious claim. I have developed on both Windows and UNIX platforms and I can testify to the ease of use of Visual Studio, but not
To summarize, there is a lot of 'it depends,' involved in these tests.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
So why would anyone still run mainframes?
Oh, that's right - downtime on a WinTel server is still 100 times more expensive than Linux Mainframes.
Where I sit, the average cost of staff is around $45/hour. With 100 people in our organization dependent on mainframe access, when our mainframe goes down, it costs us $4500 per hour.
If we were using WinTel servers for our datacenter, even a single hour of downtime would double the TCO. Even 5 minutes of lost productivity would cost us $375 - and double the cost of Windows. The weekend the Blaster worm hit, for instance, cost a certain well-known local insurance company $50,000. And that was just over the weekend. Total cleanup is expected to cost more than a million dollars!
We can't afford viruses. We can't afford mandatory updates. We can't accept arbitrary updates which change the EULA. Even a single hour of downtime per year is one too many.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware and Software licensing costs, and even staffing, are far from Total Cost of Ownership. System downtime is the single largest factor in the "real" TCO - something that Microsoft conveniently forgets.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I think the path of the Facts Against Linux document is very interesting.
Doing a pseudo-Google like analysis you see that the main site is of course the Microsoft.com Then is a major folder MS Corp. Then, BAM - the facts.
No sub directories under MS Corp like misc, or not-really-important, or small-fry, or oh-by-the-way, and neither is this one of their numbered documents. The first document on FACTS under MS Corp is comparison with Linux.
It may be reading tea leaves but as someone who likes to design directory structures with some logic - What does it mean to me ? It means M$ is paying big time attention to Linux. And I am sure if someone in the near future did a search in Google on "Facts about Microsoft Corporation" - this will be the first document that will show up in exclusion to almost everything else about M$. Linux is now officially in the Crosshairs of the biggest guns at MSCorp. Amen.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Who include IT decision makers and IT buyers for the 7 largest health care providers in the US. They have all been making noises about Linux, but nobody wants to be the first to take the plunge- I've been keeping a short mailing list updated with news items, like Israel asking for Thai pricing on MS office. This is the email I sent:
s p
----email below-------
You've been wondering when Linux will become mainstream enough for you to use it extensively in your organizations: I think you'll be interested in this recent response by Microsoft. When you have to buy research that says you have a better product, and the research companies need to skew the comparisons so heavily that it's obvious an apples-to-apples comparison would reflect unfavorably on the product you're pushing, the market has already made its choice; and then it's only a matter of time.
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/default.a
My restatements of the "facts:"
1. FROM IDC: it's cheaper to hire someone straight out of college who earned an MCSE in an online training course than it is to hire someone with 5 years of real-world Unix/Linux sysadmin experience. Especially if all you consider is the direct compensation those people recieve, and you don't include the costs associated with systems downtime, security breaches, and the ratio of sysadmins to machines, which is typically lower than 1:20 in windows environments and 1:50 or higher in unix/linux environments.
2. FROM META: it's cheaper to buy 5 or 6 $5000-per-box commodity 4U windows servers than it is to buy a $470,000 proprietary RISC 42U mainframe, even if the software that runs on the mainframe costs you nothing extra. Especially when you don't consider the costs associated with downtime, redundancy, security, or the cost of buying new software for your six commodity boxes every 3 years. And never mind comparing the performance of free software on those same six commodity boxes- that's beside the point.
3. FROM GIGA: you can save development money by forcing all of your customers to upgrade so that their systems are compatible with yours. And if your customers don't want to upgrade, they don't really need to buy your stuff anyway.
all of these so-called "market research analyst" jokers should be ashamed to have their names associated with such obvious distortions of reality. I hope we never have to resort to this kind of chicanery to prove our value to our customers.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
A disinterested third party probably don't even exist, but don't pretending IBM is unbiased, and that their whitepapers, etc. aren't filled with marketing bias as well.
Perhaps, but any respectable IT professional will recall Microsoft's "history" and lovely business practices, especially with their hate for Linux and keep that in consideration when reading this FUD (or should I more appropriately say: BS)
However, as akedia has previously mentioned... the problem lies in the advertising to upper management.
# fuser -v
#
Surely you don't distrust common sense..."Wintel server 10 times less expensive to operate than Linux mainframe"...and that's only counting the hardware! When you throw in the software, that brings up the mainframe cost another $80! And it is irrelevent to consider the cost of the Windows software, just ask them. Leave it to Microsoft to discover that mainframes cost more than servers.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Yes, because after all, IBM's "history" is flawless, right? I mean, no one has ever gone after IBM for being an abusive monopolistic player. </sarcasm>
Note: I'm not saying that this study funded by Microsoft and published by IDG is definately unbiased. I'm only saying that Microsoft isn't the first (and I doubt it will be the last) company to promote "research" such as this.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
But a lot more believable.
First, IBM didn't lie in court and didn't fake evidence.
Then, IBM stands for reliability and predictability, which is exactly what the industry wants today, after years of constant worm-attacks. Microsoft on the other hand stands for unreliability, unsecurity and arrogance.
IBM's position is quite easy: Just ask the manager how much money they lost last year on Worms/viruses and sell them the Worm-resistant Linux. (Yes I say resistant, all morons please note that resistant does not equal proof)
Microsoft became big offering products that were cheap and "good enough".
Microsoft told the managers for YEARS how much money they can save in hardware costs by dumping Unix and going for Intel. Now all of the sudden Microsoft changes it's mind and proclaims that initial costs (like hardware and licensing costs) are irrelevant and starts to put forth dubious TCO-studies?
This campaign will backfire, it will just encourage managers to get more information about that Linux-thing that gives the previously thought invincible Microsoft so much grief.
Notice that the page acknowledges the Windows trademark, but not the Linux one (which belongs to Linus Torvalds).