Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit ... Microsoft

mr.big_pig writes "The Seattle PI had a front page article analyzing the Microsoft's Get The Facts website and related ads compairing Windows to Linux. The short and sweet: follow the money and see just how 'independent' is this research. What caught my eye was that this was on the front page and not buried in the business section."

Comments

By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft can never pay for a study to be done. Noone can pay to have a study done that involves them or a field they are in. How will the studies be done?

Re:By your logic

[Neo-Rio-101]

Why do you even WANT to study something like this?
Either way, it's obvious that Microsoft wants to trumpet itself... so ANY study they do is going to come off unfavourably.

If Microsft just advertised itself similarly to the word of mouth advertising Linux does... then Microsoft would fair better.

Unfortunately, Microsoft can't get the word of mouth advertising that money can't buy....

Re:By your logic

[demise213]

This is the reason that we should all have crap-detectors set on high whenever evaluating ANY study...or any media used as a single source of information.

Someone owns every media outlet that exists...by it's very nature, it is impossible to be impartial. However, this is ok. This is how it's been since the beginning of news media. It is incumbent upon us to corroborate information and to value-judge what we read in print,watch on tv, or hear on the radio.

Use several sources. Usually the truth lies somewhere in the middle of all of them.

K

Re:By your logic

[4of12]

can't get the word of mouth advertising that money can't buy....

Wish I could remember the link, but IIRC one of the cell phone manufacturers, Ericsson, I think, had some advertising campaign where to promote their new line of cell phones with interactive games they deployed pairs of good-looking women in bars using the phones to play games. You can see where male bar patrons would suddenly become interested in being able to play games on the new phones.

I have to say, though, that the tactic might have to be modified in Microsoft's case.

I'd have a real weird feeling if I met some good-looking girl in bar using her laptop and extolling how well MSDN supported Visual Something. "My mother warned me about girls like you..."

Re:By your logic

[SoTuA]

And in other news, the Association of Beef Packagers -funded-studies about the health benefits of leftover fat from processing cowmeat have found that eating raw fat is good for your health!

Re:By your logic

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Even if I'd pick one up at a bar, I'd run everything through a compadibilty layer to make sure I didn't catch a virus.

Re:By your logic

[Crypto Gnome]

Yeah Yeah I know - don't feed the trolls/ACs, but this just needs a comment.

If JimBob SixPack funds research comparing three mechanics, and he's a mechanic ,and he's One of the three in the study, and "it just so happens" that the study finds JimBob SixPack is the best place to get your car serviced - that's suspicious (ie we "suspect" that the study results were influenced by the source of funding)

If , on the other hand, the study found that JimBob kinda sux, and you should go elsewhere.

This is just common sense

The fact that Microsoft often/regularly funds studies which (surprise!) are very complimentary about Microsoft is well-known. The fact that neither Microsoft and nor the group doing the study makes even the slightest mention of the fact that Microsoft Funded the Study (therefore, at least in theory, it's possible that the funding influenced the results) hints even stronger at a conflict of interest.

Again this is just common sense

In no way is this Linux Geeks Against Microsoft this is purely people with more than an ounce of common sense saying Business A funded some research which shows their product is the best - YAWN, why am I not surprised

Fact: when business XYZ funds "research" which says (in conclusion) many nice things about their product, and said research is publicized, anyone with more than half a brain realises this is not "research" but advertising.

Re:By your logic

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Oh, Microsoft gets a lot of advertising that money can't buy. The same sort of adverstising that someone who habitually rips people off at the used car lot gets. Everyone who has done business with them will continue to bad mouth them and anyone associated with them for as long as they draw breath.

Re:By your logic

[fermion]

At best a single study is a guess. At worst, it is an opinion. This is the case in every field. This is a fundamental reality. Even in the best studies, that do their best to use the hardest science possible and the scientific method and be as objective as humanly possible, a study is still a guess.

That is why the second step of any serious study is peer review and the third step is duplication by disinterested parties. Reality begins to form after many different comparable studies are done and synthesized into a consensus.

It is true that MS or anyone else can contract a study and tell the researchers to design tests that will tend towards a preset abstract. That is their prerogative. It doesn't really matter because critical thinkers will discount the results until such results are subject to the adversarial system of science.

Re:By your logic

[amithv]

Actually, there are some commerical companies in the US who use a modified version of what you are talking about to hawk their wares. There was a recent article in Forbes about Tremor (a word of mouth group made up for teens). Would be pretty interesting if Microsoft tried something like this and if it would work. Imagine random people getting Microsoft swag in the mail, I wonder what that would do for their image

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

... but of course, all the studies done by Linux-friendly groups are completely legitimate and without bias, right?!?!?!

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

About the only way to get close to a fair comparison would be to have a consumer, without a pre-determined outcome, fund it. Now that being said, finding an unbiased consumer is almost impossible. Simply by limiting the study to a few operating systems already implies a tendency toward those OS's over others. Then consider the requirements for the study. Most likely these will be written based on previous knowledge of one or more of the products in the study.

Essentially a completely unbiased study would be nearly impossible.

Re:By your logic

[johnnyb]

I think an even bigger problem is that it's not necessarily the _results_ that are a problem, but the question. For example, a lot of the Microsoft studies compare Microsoft and Linux/J2EE. What an idiotic comparison!!!! You cannot legitimately say that it was a Microsoft/Linux comparison. The only thing that happened to be "Linux" about it was that they ran J2EE and all of the other overpriced software (like Oracle) on Linux.

What makes the research flawed is that someone else gets to ask the question, and they get to be selective as to which results are returned. The research group does not get to publish a statement saying that they think the questions were bogus or focusing on the wrong issues.

It still amazes and troubles me that a comparison of Microsoft and J2EE (and not even open-source J2EE) is touted as a Microsoft/Linux battle. How does one even make that jump? Especially since J2EE runs fine on Microsoft platforms. If they had been honest, they would have either (a) run J2EE and Oracle on _both_ platforms, in which case Linux would have been cheaper, or (b) analyzed "common use" of either operating system (I do not know what the results of this would be, but my guess is that it favors Linux). The question as posed is already biased.

Re:By your logic

[RoLi]

Of course Microsoft has the right to pay for as many studies as they want.

But as long as there are some remains of free speech we also have the right not to believe said studies and publicly announce our disbelief.

Re:By your logic

[devilsadvoc8]

What is truly entertaining is that all of the linux drones get a burr up their ass every time someone (with or without an agenda) says anything but linux is the greatest thing ever. Learn to roll with the punches people. This "study" was for advertising. Reading anything else into is an overreaction.

Re:By your logic

[dasmegabyte]

Wheee. The problem I have with most of these studies (besides the fact that they are completely useless, as the decision is never as simple as "X is better than Y") is that the people who truly know -- those who have chosen one product over the other -- can apparently never be trusted, because they have a vested interest in it.

For example: our company writes software for Microsoft's .NET. We're updating all of our programs for DOS (programs which are still used and many people don't want to give them up). Our clients have a massive install base of Microsoft based tools, many of which were expensive and will never be updated, in some cases because the company that wrote them is no longer in business. It took a long time and a lot of research to come to the decision to use .NET. We looked at Java, Delphi, and C++ with a series of graphics toolkits, and we settled on .NET. The framework offered us a lot of flexibility and allowed us to write our first application with blinding speed. Our customers love it. In this, it has been a success for us.

If I were to write an article for an IT magazine praising .NET for custom desktop development, I would definitely be branded a Microsoft evangelist and my opinion ignored by the staunch open source community. Never mind that my webservers run Linux-based applications, or that before I started this job I had great success writing Java applications for use with Oracle. Never mind that, internally, I fough against .NET for months from a strictly anti-monopolistic standpoint, only to realize in the end that it wasn't a complete piece of shit gussied up by clever marketting.

Microsoft feels that their way of doing software is best. If they didn't, they'd be building on top of Open Source the way Apple is. Obviously, since they've got the biggest selling operating system in the world, other people think so as well. This can't be explained away by marketshare and FUD...I own several Linux machines and an OSX laptops, and I still use my Windows based PC most often. Mostly because my wife steals the laptop, but truth be told, I'm on the dumb PC. If a researcher called, and asked which machine I used most, and which machine I've spent the least time fighting with to get what I have to do done, I'd say the PC. Sorry guys.

I'm not saying this particular study isn't sleazy -- but if a third party comes up with valid data through valid double blind studies, the validity isn't immediately invalidated JUST because it favors the company that paid it to do the research in the first place. After all, drug companys have to pay to have their drugs tested -- that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be passed every time. My wife works as a contract archeologist. She's paid by developers to do research into the history of their projects, ostensibly to prove that there's no historic value. And you know, she's really objective about it. If there's something of historical merit, she reports it, even though it gets her screamed at by developers (whose projects are then set back MONTHS while the State Historic Preservation Office does its thing). In short: the fact that Microsoft funded this study does make it suspicious. But unless you've read it and found a problem with your data, you can't immediately assume it's been skewed.

Re:By your logic

[NixLuver]

" What is truly entertaining is that all of the linux drones get a burr up their ass every time someone (with or without an agenda) says anything but linux is the greatest thing ever."

While in some sense, I agree with your sentiment here, I'm forced to take some exception. My reaction would have been the same if the platform had been OSX or *BSD instead of Linux. The fact is that millions of people will suck this crap up as though it were gospel and contribute to the horseshit that flows from Redmond in an uninterrupted stream. The problem is that Microsoft has, once again, chosen marketing over improvement, and once again, there will be millions of people too dense to access this simple concept. It's frustration, not just with M$, but with the entire process, from top to bottom, that enables corporations to manage the perceptions of the masses... This is the same process that gave us GeeDubya.

Re:By your logic

[Osrin]

Why do you WANT to study something like this? Because when you're in a sales situation one of the first thing any sensible customer asks is "show me the data".

As the poster above says, if MSFT don't fund the creation of the data then it will never exist.

Re:By your logic

[arkanes]

I'd just like to respond by saying that while I'm sure your wife is very objective and honest with her job, not all the people who do her sort of work are (I'm originally from the northwest coast, and biased/incomplete environmental impact studies are the things of legend there). Unless theres serious oversight or a single source of testing (like the FDA for drugs), then companies (at least the sleazier ones) will gravitate toward "researchers" who can be guaranteed to provide the results they want.

That said, the LAST microsoft study that everyone on Slashdot screamed about turned out to reveal legitimate problems with the 2.2 kernel under heavy load (thundering herd problem), and was the impetous for major scheduler improvments in 2.4

Re:By your logic

[mpe]

I think an even bigger problem is that it's not necessarily the _results_ that are a problem, but the question.

The "question" is a part of the methodology.

For example, a lot of the Microsoft studies compare Microsoft and Linux/J2EE. What an idiotic comparison!!!!

Thing is that it isn't obviously an idiotic comparison to someone who dosn't know the subject. Unlike, for example, comparing wine (or pizza) made from either grapes or tomatoes...

Re:By your logic

[JohnFluxx]

Many years back, Linus was talking about how great MS were, because of their good bug reports. Admittedly, he said, they reported them in the wall street journel instead of the mailing list, but at least they were trying. :)

Re:By your logic

[mpe]

At best a single study is a guess. At worst, it is an opinion. This is the case in every field. This is a fundamental reality. Even in the best studies, that do their best to use the hardest science possible and the scientific method and be as objective as humanly possible, a study is still a guess.

Which is why scientific studies go into enough detail of methodology so that further work can be done.

That is why the second step of any serious study is peer review and the third step is duplication by disinterested parties. Reality begins to form after many different comparable studies are done and synthesized into a consensus.

With marketing "studies" only those which give the "right" conclusions will get to see the light of day. Whereas in scientific studies it's possible for studies with unexpected results to be circulated.

It is true that MS or anyone else can contract a study and tell the researchers to design tests that will tend towards a preset abstract. That is their prerogative. It doesn't really matter because critical thinkers will discount the results until such results are subject to the adversarial system of science.

Problem is that many of the people choosing to spend vasts sums of money with Microsoft are not in this group in the first place...

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah Yeah I know - don't feed the trolls/ACs, but this just needs a comment.

You "talk" too much.

Re:By your logic

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Microsoft feels that their way of doing software is best. If they didn't, they'd be building on top of Open Source the way Apple is. Obviously, since they've got the biggest selling operating system in the world, other people think so as well.

I'm not so sure about that. Microsoft got to be the biggest software company in the world through anticompetitive policies that were challenged by the FTC and the DOJ. Politics let them get away with it. And then Microsoft illegally abused their unfairly gained monopoly in Operating Systems to crush any competition in the emerging Internet arena. They got caught, convicted, and have used their ill-gained money to manipulate the political process to get away scot-free again.

Re:By your logic

[wolrahnaes]

Imagine random people getting AOL CDs in the mail. See what that did for their image?

Re:By your logic

[Simonetta]

In still more news, Wackenhut and Correction Corporation of America have determined that locking up black kids in private prisons for possession of ten cents worth of marijuana is a positive influence on society.

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's slanted toward MS, it's on there website! Did you expect they would publish something that would show them in a bad light? What company would do that? No sensible person would do that.

The ANTI-MS crowd loses a little bit of credibility every time someone makes a ludicrous statement like this.

This is bashing for bashing sake...

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, i just upgraded to 2.6.14pre.

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

it was that they ran J2EE and all of the other overpriced software (like Oracle) on Linux.

Yeah, but who is selling Linux to CIOs? It's not the people who put out vim and php. It's Oracle, IBM, and all the other fatcat vendors that have historically made Microsoft look like the cheap guy.

Re:By your logic

[johnnyb]

"Yeah, but who is selling Linux to CIOs? It's not the people who put out vim and php."

Actually, it's their own tech department that usually does the selling to the CIO. Or a custom programming shop. These people are usually more likely to be pure-play open-source.

Re:By your logic

[dasmegabyte]

I've heard this before. It's simply not true. Yes, they have a monopoly, but they didn't GET their monopoly through monopolistic, or even "unfair," practices. They got it through good software. When I bought Windows in 1991, I didn't do so because of unfair practices or a desktop monopoly. I bought it because Windows kicked the SHIT out of anything else on the market for PCs. It's still a nice operating system, even if XP has taken a giant step backward. If you make shitty products, it doesn't matter if you have a monopoly -- you'll fail.

In areas where Microsoft pushed bad software with their monopoly, they generally didn't win. They have bundled Paint with Windows since 3.0, it didn't stop Adobe from making millions off of Photoshop. MSN Messenger hasn't crushed AOL Instant Messenger, nor did NetMeeting. Hyperterminal was such shit that I bought Procomm a day after getting Windows 95. The first Internet Explorer they bundled with their OS was such crap that I had to buy Netscape 3. It was the only browser that really worked like NCSA Mosaic had, and that was, at the time, the standard browser implementation.

So Microsoft's major internet tools crushed nobody that wasn't already in danger of falling apart. Netscape was giving away their browser, just like Microsoft was, only Netscape's browser, during the key period in the "war", was complete shit. Their Gold package was complete shit, too, only it cost $70. My university forbade the use of IE on our computers out of respect for Netscape, and the students -- the STUDENTS, mind you, not Microsoft -- rose such hell that we had to change the policy. Netscape's 4.x browser was never fast enough, nor reliable enough, to take on Microsoft's, and their 6.x browser took YEARS to complete. Monopoly nothing, Netscape failed because it was a mismanaged clusterfuck when Microsoft was making steady improvements. And don't give me any of that "proprietary tag" crap...web designers were, and still are, an idealistic bunch. We wrote most of our pages to work with EITHER browser. If Microsoft did anything anti-competitive, it was making a browser that forgave the designer for making stupid mistakes that Netscape was too strict to allow. I don't see where that's anything but Netscape's fault for trying to impose their will on people...

In many areas, Microsoft's tools are sorely lacking. In some, they're pathetic toys -- Publisher comes to mind. Even in the area where they supposedly have a monopoly, they're fading fast as people replace expensive Windows servers with Linux, BSD, etc, running Apache instead of IIS, MySQL instead of SQL Server, etc.

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not that they cannot fund a study, its their track record. These people started a phony grass-roots movement for cripes sakes. Poorly done and falsified studies are their forte.

Re:By your logic

[Rutulian]

I'm sorry, but nobody will ever convince that Microsoft makes better products than anybody else and that is why they are successful. Microsoft learned a long time ago, as did other monoliths like WalMart, that they don't need to sell good products. They need to sell good enough products, and then convince people to buy them.

Windows was not better, from a technical standpoint, than OS/2. Hell, it wasn't even better than MacOS. And MSDOS certainly wasn't better than the BSDs. So why did people buy Windows? Well, Apple had been pissing people off for a while and was, at that time, starting to go down the toilet, so many people were just turned off of MacOS. BSD and MSDOS were about equally cryptic to use, but nobody knew about BSD, and DOS compatible software was what was appearing on the consumer market. OS/2 suffered the same problem. People were using Windows at work, so they started using Windows at home.

Microsoft was in the right place at the right time, and they were successfully able to capture a lot of mindshare. That is what marketing is about, capturing and keeping mindshare. Nevermind what was a technically superior product, people went with the product that was better marketed. That is why marketing is such an important tool for business, and Microsoft proved better at it than IBM and Novell.

So yes, Microsoft succeeded in a real marketplace atmosphere, but they didn't do it with superior software. They did it with superior marketing. And then when they had a critical level of mindshare, it suddenly became very hard for any sort of competing software to get it back. Breaking any sort of monopoly is difficult. It takes a lot more than just having a superior competing product.

I will concede that Microsoft won the browser battle with IE partly because it did certain things better, but bundling the browser with Windows definitely had something to do with it, as did having Netscape-incompatible JavaScript and CSS implementations. Now that there definitely is a superior browser alternative (Mozilla by every account I have ever heard), why aren't people madly switching from IE? If simply having a superior browser is all it takes, why are there still IE-only websites? Web designers should have shrugged off IE a long time ago, but they haven't. And that is because Microsoft no longer has a superior browser, but they do still have the mindshare.

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the Slashdot / open source concept of freedom. No hang on. Someone says something that he believes to be true and the pack rates him a Troll because they disagree. If you're going for the points, dis Microsoft and get an Insightful ! You don't even need to have it bear any resemblance to fact or truth.

Re:By your logic

[Anonymous Coward]

At the end of the day, all these Linux fanatics go home and turn on their Windows XP box and play games... how do expect Windows to fall off the cliff when you keep doing this?

Re:By your logic

[Neo-Rio-101]

Wrong. A sensible customer will do the study *themselves*... knowing full well that asking Microsft to "Show me the data" is only going to result in a pro-Microsoft marketing campaign anyway. A lazy customer that just wants to be made to feel better about lining Microsoft's pockets will request the data from MS.

Re:By your logic

[Herschel Cohen]

Until I read this, I gave your comments some credibilty: It's simply not true. Yes, they have a monopoly, but they didn't GET their monopoly through monopolistic, or even "unfair," practices. They got it through good software. When I bought Windows in 1991, I didn't do so because of unfair practices or a desktop monopoly.

They did it on marketing, there were better products.

Re:By your logic

[cbreaker]

You miss many points.

First of all, like the article says, when a company funds it's own "research" like this, we'll likely never see the results that come out unavorably. Microsoft could very well have commissioned 40 studies of Linux vs. Windoes, and 35 came out with Linux on top. Which ones are they going to throw on their propaghanda site? Yea..

Then there's the other point of marketshare that you so carelessly shrugged off. I shouldn't even have to explain this... MS owns the market. Applications are written for the biggest market, Windows. People are forced to use Windows because the applications are only available for it. Now, even if I believed that Windows *WAS* just as good as the OSS alternatives, it doesn't matter because most people have no choice. They MUST use Windows because the applications they must run are only there. It's a tough cycle to break, and I'm pleased with the progress OSS has been making. Breaking into such a monopoly can be damned impossible, so why are so many people starting to consider and use Linux?

There's many reasons.. one is the price, sure. But I'd say that even more important is not being a slave to Microsoft's OS. Your software only obsoletes when your IT staff decides it's time. Your applications will run until you decide they shouldn't. Control. People, and business, like control over their very expensive IT systems. And let's not forget that OSS is some of the best damned software out there.

I'm not bunking your companies descition to go with .NET. After all, when working with old Microsoft OS applications, it's not much of a brainer going with a MS development platform to upgrade them. Not like you had a big choice..

Re:By your logic

[Sj0]

Finally, Imperial Tobacco has released independant studies indicating that cigarettes are beneficial to your health. Smoke up kids, get plenty of Vitamin E!

Re:By your logic

[Osrin]

very few organisations have the cash or the skills to be able to do that. The best you can hope for in the majority of situations is to put competing studies from different organisations side by side and draw your own conclusions.

Re:By your logic

[fuzza]

Wish I could remember the link, but IIRC one of the cell phone manufacturers, Ericsson, I think, had some advertising campaign where to promote their new line of cell phones with interactive games they deployed pairs of good-looking women in bars using the phones to play games. You can see where male bar patrons would suddenly become interested in being able to play games on the new phones.

Said link would be here. (Took me a while to find...)

Interesting

[LochNess]

I think this part of the article is significant:

One problem, he said, is that companies will tend to keep under wraps the results of commissioned studies that turn out unfavorably. That means the public may get only part of the story when it reads a report sponsored by one of its subjects. "We're only seeing the ones they want us to see," Cherry said.

Re:Interesting

[BuckaBooBob]

Not to mention... How the studies are conducted... Mostly when MS is comparing Windows up against its like comparing Apples to Wax Apples... They can apear to be the same... But How they are used are 100% diffrent. The one study goes on comparing multiple windows boxes against a linux mainframe consolidation server... Umm... Well Linux can run on any platform windows can... why not use the same boxes? (Because it wouldn't produce favorable results for MS)

Where as I think most of the linux vs ms studies that get done are alot more closer to real apples vs real apples. But I haven't seen very many studies at all in detail poing linux over windows.. Its just my guess they are alot closer to a direct comparison than what I have seen in windows vs linux with windows on top.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Employer's best interest should be the bottomline and happy workers.

Buying Microsoft software won't get you either, so who's living in the reality distortion zone here?

Re:Interesting

[Zontar The Mindless]

That's pretty sad when nearly 30 minutes after you posted that troll, nobody's thought it worth the trouble of modding down, eh?

(P.S. Lots of folks who use Windows don't trust MS-funded studies, either. Fucktard.)

Re:Interesting

[gnu-generation-one]

"I think this part of the article is significant:
One problem, he said, is that companies will tend to keep under wraps the results of commissioned studies that turn out unfavorably."

Lemme guess, the rest of the article was unfavourable, so you kept it under wraps? ;-)

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I really wish some linux distrobutions would do some marketing studies though.
Just get groups of 20 people from a few different cities, show them Linux and ask what they wish would be improved the most.
Then ask what it would take for them to use it, and what kind of distrobution system would work best for them.

Re:Interesting

[tealover]

Is this really surprising? Are companies in the business of shooting themselves in the foot? They are under no obligation to release *every* study they undertake.

I really don't understand why this is news. Are people really that naive?

Re:Interesting

[Eivind]

But another, much more common problem is sadly not adressed by the article

The article does hint that whoever pays for a report may also get undue influence on the outcome. If not for any other reason than that the research-firm wishes to get similar tasks in the future.

But much more blatant is the influence of the commissioner on the questions asked in the research.

Thus the "Get the Facts" website has reports with summaries like:

Microsoft-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple Windows Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator.

Thing is, that's not comparing Windows to Linux. That is comparing the cost-structure of "Mainframe" computers with "heaps of cheap boxes". It is well-known that generic boxes provides unparallelled price/performance for tasks that are easily divisible, such as web-serving.

Had you asked the oposite question, you'd have gotten the same answer: "Eivind-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple Linux Web servers perform better than a Windows mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator.

What is the value of a study where you can swap the words "Linux" and "Windows", and get the same result ? Other than if you're wondering what is cheapest as a webserver for static web-pages: a mainframe, or half a dozen generic x86-boxen. But noone is really wondering about that anyways.

This is only one example, there are many.

My point is that even if the commissioner does not unduly influence the research, he still has a huge influence simply in deciding which questions to ask.

Re:Interesting

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

It is news because of where it appears (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and the fact that it is not just Microsoft cheerleading.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll tell you right now:
Interoperability
Try to copy/paste across a terminal session, Emacs, and KWrite.
Good luck.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly when MS is comparing Windows up against its like comparing Apples to Wax Apples

This one's no different. I was looking at one of the ads the other day and laughed because they were comparing the cost of a Windows 2003 Server running on INTEL vs Linux on a mainframe.

Also had a chuckle thinking about seeing the results the other way around (Server 2003 on a mainframe and Linux on INTEL)

Re:Interesting

[DickBreath]

I really don't understand why this is news. Are people really that naive?

Yes. And here is the proof. Obviously you are that naive, in a different way, in order to ask such a question. No offense intended. There are niave PHB's, and there are bosses with flat hair. For the niave ones it takes an article to point out the obvious to them. Show them the article and they will realize "Oh, I see that now." just as quickly as they would believe any Microsoft funded study or SCO PR shoved in front of their face.

Re:Interesting

[Bert64]

It works fine, i can even paste into a web browser like this one, and its much easier than windows or macos... i just select the text with the mouse and hit the middle button to paste it.

Re:Interesting

[Lord Agni]

Ironic that Cherry picked that statement to make.

Re:Interesting

[awol]

Classic example from Yes, Minister. About getting the desired result by asking the right questions (cut and paste of the quote from http://www.asmallvictory.net/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=1879);

Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard Woolley: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample."

A classic.

Re:Interesting

[tealover]

No, no, no, no.

I wasn't talking about the naivete of PHB's. I was talking about the naivete of people who are surprised that companies do not release studies which reach negative conclusions.

Please try to read posts before karma whoring next time.

Re:Interesting

[fucksl4shd0t]

It is news because of where it appears (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and the fact that it is not just Microsoft cheerleading.

Um, as far as I know, the Seattle PI has been critical of Microsoft for a longtime. Just because is across a small pond from Seattle doesn't mean Microsoft is loved in this area. They contribute no jobs to the workforce, very little money to the local economy, and we've been in a serious depression since Boeing packed up most of its people and left. Why should Seattle PI be any less critical of Microsoft than anybody else?

ON the other hand, Microsoft did send audit letters to some school districts in the area, and we're *all* still mad about that.

Re:Interesting

[poot_rootbeer]

"Eivind-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple Linux Web servers perform better than a Windows mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator."

Windows... mainframe?

Is there a HOWTO for this? I'm trying to get XP to boot up on this here IBM z800, but it doesn't seem to work for some reason.

Re:Interesting

[daviddennis]

The problem is that most people don't have three-button mice.

I ran into this problem because I had a TrackPoint keyboard with my Linux system, and I loved the trackpoint and didn't want to stop using it just because it had the wrong number of buttons.

Emulate3Buttons didn't seem to work well in my case, so cut and paste was horribly frustrating.

Hope that helps understanding.

D

Re:Interesting

[daviddennis]

Office is the problem. I tried installing OpenOffice on a couple of computers, using the excuse that then we wouldn't have to pay license fees, and everyone hated it because it didn't read Office files well at all.

People do hate getting viruses and worms, but they seem to be slowly learning not to click on email attachments.

When I found my company, it will use exclusively Macs. You get Office and you don't have to deal with Windows. Best of both worlds, far as I'm concerned.

D

Re:Interesting

[AftanGustur]

The one study goes on comparing multiple windows boxes against a linux mainframe consolidation server... Umm... Well Linux can run on any platform windows can... why not use the same boxes? (Because it wouldn't produce favorable results for MS)

You are absolutely right. There is often a lot of information in the question itself, if you have access to it.

To get the full picture, you would need access to all communication between the entity that asked for the study to be done, and the company that did the study. From the moment they asked for it, and until it was released. Without that information the situation can be like "Yeah, okay the answer is 42, but what was the question again ?"

Re:Interesting

[prestidigital]

Also, if they are capable of front-paging the bulleted statistics that seem to show a clear advantage, they should be capable of putting up a sentence or two that explains WHY. Even it that sentence rattles off a few things, followed by "...and other factors." (where "other factors" is perhaps a link to the conclusion section of the research).

Re:Interesting

[johnnyb]

"I'm trying to get XP to boot up on this here IBM z800, but it doesn't seem to work for some reason."

Obviously, you need to flip the Magic Switch

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I posted an "I use Gentoo; how does this affect me??" comment a few days ago and some jerks modded it +3, Funny!
+3!!! I mean what the hell?

Re:Interesting

[Mildew Man]

My point is that even if the commissioner does not unduly influence the research, he still has a huge influence simply in deciding which questions to ask.

Very true and very similar to surveys of public opinion. Baiting the response of the person taking a survey is a common practice:

Do you believe it is OK to kill babies?

versus:

Do you believe a women has a right to make her own decisions about her health care and her body?

We can make studies conclude what we want in how we structure them just as easily as making surveys conclude what we want by how we ask the questions.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"It works fine" -- "I just hit the middle button to paste it"

ROTFLMAO

Oh the irony...

What a complete, utter moron.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo users with mod points, who know?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the irony...

What a complete, utter moron. ... says the person who can't learn how to paste in X.

Re:Interesting

[Eivind]

That's what I said: Linux on heaps of boxes will give better price/performance than Windows on a Mainframe.

You're pointing out that Windows on a Mainframe gives zero performance, that minor detail, however, does nothing to discredit my conclusion.

Re:Where is everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah someone definately fucked up. No first posters either because of it. That's just wrong.

No Comment

[Papa Legba]

I suspect the lack of comments is due to the fact that this topic is SSOOOOOOO Obvious. What news flash are they going to pop next. Workers expected to produce when they are payed? Duh....

Re:No Comment

[plj]

I suspect the lack of comments is due to the fact that this topic is SSOOOOOOO Obvious

Also che surrounding topics were both rather popular. I don't know the exact posting times of these topics, but one could suspect something...

Microsoft's new PR war

[Larry David]

I've definitely noticed in the last few mnths that Microsoft seems to be REALLY ramping up its PR war against Linux. They've been talking about it for a while, and now we're seeing it.

On the /. story below this there was a link to e-week about the 2.7 Linux kernel, and guess who had a big ad on that page? Microsoft. And the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux.

Even Slashdot has been running Microsoft ads, and almost any tech news site you go to is crawling with them. Microsoft has a definite advantage against Linux when it comes to ad budget, as only IBM seems to be really pushing Linux in terms of PR and advertising.. and even then it's more about IBM's solutions than Linux, which is not surprising really. And so Microsoft is going to continue funding studies and surveys, slightly tweaking the questions to favor them ("How easy do you find it to connect to an Active Directory from Linux?"), showing the world the results which are good, and dismissing the surveys which are bad.

I wonder if there are any Linux mad advertising zealots with deep pockets to get some ads on those sites, and to generally kick up a stink and get us lots more stories in the papers and magazines. This is a PR war, and if you're a Linux devotee, make sure you fight back against it in some way (even if it's just winning your clients over to Linux even more).

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Killswitch1968]

I've definitely noticed in the last few mnths that Microsoft seems to be REALLY ramping up its PR war against Linux. They've been talking about it for a while, and now we're seeing it.

Linux's true downfall has far less to do with MS's market dominance than it does with basic marketing. It's nice to have a product, but it's useless if no one knows about it.
For example the people that use Internet Explorer do so not because "other browsers don't work with ActiveX" but because they are not even aware of the existence of Opera or Mozilla. The only browser ever mentioned in the same breath as MS is Netscape, which is massively inferior to the aforementioned browsers. At best it's marginally superior to MS, but not enough to have a significant competetive advantage.
Take a look at iMacs, often cited as one of the most brilliant marketing programs conceived. Personally I hated those ugly things, nevertheless they did exceptionally well.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Larry David]

I agree, although it's often more simple than that. I converted a client to Mozilla Firebird, which they used for a while without incident. Eventually they admitted they'd gone back to IE. Why? Because they preferred the look of the IE icon.

This is what we're dealing with out there.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[SgtChaireBourne]

Well, it's largely a marketing company. For the three months ending December 2003, it spent $ 2 467 000 000 USD on sales and marketing. Some of the other line items probably include some marketing activities, so that's at least $ 9 868 000 000 000 USD per year.

The gains that Linux, BSD, OS X and others have made despite this warchest is quite a testimonial as to how far behind that company's technology is.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[inode_buddha]

And that's just it right there. MS is smart enough to know how far PR goes despite damn near owning the desktop market. The "pure linux" players haven't even tried (RH, SuSE, etc.). I know their budgets aren't as huge as MS or IBM but I'm surprised they haven't caught onto this. It would make my week to see an RH or SuSE ad on TV, like some of the Apple ads. I'd even be wiling to bet that the ROI is worth it, if they do it in tech-heavy cities such as Boston, Atlanta, NYC, LA, Chicago, etc.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[cubicledrone]

$ 9 868 000 000 000 USD

Wow. $9.8 trillion. Now that's a lot of banner ads.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

> I wonder if there are any Linux mad advertising zealots with deep pockets

You could try asking some of the people who've made a lot of money writing code for free. Uh, I mean...

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[sweede]

what the hell is 2 467 000 000 ?

and btw, 2,467,000,000 * 4 != 9,868,000,000,000 (trillion) , but 9,868,000,000 (9.8 billion) Which is probably incorrect seeing as its unlikly that they spend the same amount each quarter.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[McDutchie]

Linux's true downfall has far less to do with MS's market dominance than it does with basic marketing. It's nice to have a product, but it's useless if no one knows about it.

Thankfully, Microsoft is fixing that now.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[fajoli]

Linux's true downfall has . . .

This assumes that the value of Linux is diminished somehow by fewer users. Linux (the kernel) does not gain from network effects the same way a browser does. Linux cannot win or lose in a practical sense. And as long as hardware manufacturers don't actively cut their only lifeline to Microsoft independence, Linux should continue to operate just fine for the millions that use it.

On a related note, in my experience this past year, Mozilla compatibility has been steadily increasing. Both from accomodations by the Mozilla team for IE's flaws and increased awareness from website authors.

Re: Microsoft's new PR war

[Black Parrot]

> Linux's true downfall has far less to do with...

Tell us more about this 'downfall'. Do I need to quit using it?

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[saden1]

Hate to tell you but quite a lot of ActiveX applications crash Mozilla. This is one of the main reason why my company doesn't even bother with Mozilla or Netscape.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux.

It's true!

Scenario 1: Windows XP on a Pentium 4 outperforms Linux 0.1 on a 386sx.

Scenario 2: A cluster of quad Xeon Windows 2003 boxes serve webpages faster than a single Linux machine that's not running a web server.

Scenario 3: A supercomputer running Windows 2003 outperforms a monkey simulating Linux with a broken abacus.

Scenario 4: Linux 2.6 outperforms Windows 1.0 on all machines tested (look at us! We're fair and balanced(tm)!)

Scenario 5: There is no scenario 5.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's nice to have a product, but it's useless if no one knows about it.

Linux is a tool, not a product. Everyone already knows about it, and those who need it are already using it.

Microsoft will not persuade current Linux users, and the people whom Microsoft will dissuade from using Linux, should not use it anyway, so this is a service to everyone. It prevents clueless people from doing something the might regret later.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

"Linux's true downfall .."
Is the Roman empire next? (news at six)

In "my" real world (university), the IT people are idiots (e.g. using M$ boxes for DNS, blocking CVS), the CS department makes students use Linux and the math department servers, graduate students and some faculty use Linux. (One faculty member uses and maintains OS/2.) Even though the "head IT" person hates Linux, some of the administrators higher up realize that Linux is valuable and M$ products are insecure (blah, blah). We are buying an ERP and I am interested in seeing what OS is used. (My bet is Oracle running on Linux.)

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Killswitch1968]

I was struggling to choose a word other than "downfall", but couldn't come up with one. Drawback? Failure? I apologize for my limited vocabulary.

As for ActiveX, what I meant was your normal JoeBlow user knows nothing of ActiveX. They use IE not because other browsers won't be compatible but simply out of ignorance of the competetion.
Unfortunately consumers use the excuse that Microsoft is a monopoly for their own failures as a consumer. Linux and Mozilla have always relied on word of mouth for their PR. This is painfully slow, and has mostly stayed within the 'geek' circles. It's going to take time.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to tell you but quite a lot of ActiveX applications crash Mozilla.

Well, duh. It might amaze you to learn that XUL applications tend not to work too well in IE, too. Funny, that.

The real question is what the fuck you're using ActiveX for. It provides no functionality that you can't get with a STANDARD system like Java - heck, you can do most of it with EcmaScript - and introduces all sorts of huge security risks. Not to mention that in recent IE it's also very annoying because you have to agree to use ActiveX about ten times per page before it will do anything.

Stop using ActiveX. Start using standards. Then you'll be able to use Mozilla OR Internet Explorer, as you prefer. Choice is good, right?

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to see more Linux ads, but we already have IBM and Sun with heavy business-desktop-oriented campaigns.

Don't ignore them because they aren't "pure Linux" - I can tell you from personal experience that the IBM and Sun ads are interesting a lot of people in Linux, who had previously been buying into Microsoft's FUD.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

So did NOKIA phones. Not because they were better, more functional etc. but because they had interchangable faceplates. That only shows human stupidity.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[DickBreath]

You don't need marketing if you have a true grass roots movement. It starts from the bottom up. Gradually builds momentum as more and more people get it.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Mozilla ignores ActiveX crap, it doesn't even parse it. A crash is extremely unlikely to be caused by content which is ignored..

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe with the use of some clever google trickery, people's attention could be brought to the facts that Microsoft do not wish people to get...

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

you are talking about Ads. Ads are not PR.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Felinoid]

For example the people that use Internet Explorer do so not because "other browsers don't work with ActiveX" but because they are not even aware of the existence of Opera or Mozilla.

Actually Linux has quite a bit of advertsing. Some from news some from advocacy and some from IBM.

However you'll be supprised how many people know anything about Windows.
Snipped from Computer stupiditys
Tech Support: "May I ask what operating system you are running today?"
Customer: "A computer."

I had a similare conversation with my sister. I asked her what web browser she was using and she said she didn't know. She is tech savy enough to know she dosen't know. Most people think the web browser they use is "Pentium 4" or "Gateway" some might even say "Windows" only a tiny handful will actually say "Internet Explorer"... and even then they won't know what version.

On that... Believe it or not somebody is using a beta version of Internet Exploror (or a very poor bot) eather way I plan on blocking it's access. At the very least somebody needs a browser update.

Web professionals often have multipul versions of IE installed (there is a hack to make this possable) to insure compatability. Not only do users use IE but they only update it when they update the operating system and usually that happends when they update the whole computer.

Microsofts success is due to the ultimate advertsing.. The only product available in most cases.

The downfall of Linux is much less like the downfall of Rome and more like the downfall of socity. Often discussed never manifest.

In the server market Linux is an unqualified success. Linux has more share of the desktop market than it rightfully deserves. Nearly all of it users looking for a cheap alternitive to Windows. Linux owes any success it obtains it the desktop market to Microsofts sloppy work and successfully crushing all closed source compeditors.

To add to the picture Linux is pushing aside compeditors left and right in the imbeded market including Microsoft.

Linux is a failure in the desktop market becouse it simply isn't ready for the desktop market.
Yet it is making headway.

If a clunky cryptic CLUE operating system can get as far as Linux has in the desktop what's going to happen when KDE or Gnome is ready for the avrage user?

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey now.

If the lizard logo makes people feel silly... then it's a bad logo. Simple as that. (But something the basement variety geek never understands.)

There should be a Mozilla that had a different logo and another name. "Mozilla" and "Firebird" both sound too kiddie for many people. "Safari" is okay because there's a nice "Internet jungle" metaphor and there's some Hemingway-esque style in it... I wish Netscape liberated the old familiar "Navigator" to the Mozilla project, but that ain't gonna happen; and if it did, the Moz people wouldn't want to use it. Well, I'm sure there are tons of normal sounding names.

But because it's open source, it has to sound something childish. *sigh*

I know, I know. Just my opinions. Well, not. They aren't. I hear these a lot. You don't?

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Bert64]

Scenario 4: Windows 1.0 outperforms Linux 2.6 on an 8086 with 640kb ram, Linux failed to boot atall.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

"Nearly all of it users looking for a cheap alternitive to Windows."
My university has a license which provides free M$ software to us (faculty). The (new) AMD-64 on my desk is dual bootable; Red Hat Enterprise and Gentoo. Money is not the issue.

I received a 164 Alpha (Aspen Systems rather than DEC) four or five years ago; I am using it right now. (kvm is great!) I used M$ NT and this was very stable. Then I tried Linux (Red Hat 2.0 or 2.2 ??); even then, Linux was much nicer than NT on Alpha. (I understand NT on Alpha is the best OS M$ has produced.) The price of the software has never been the issue. The issues are "freedom" (like the academic research model) and quality (including security).

PS "alternative" (not "alternitive")

Re: Microsoft's new PR war

[fognugen]

How come Homer and Krusty look like clones?

In an interview on the NPR show "Fresh Air", Matt Groening explained that when they created Krusty he was supposed to simply be a clown version of Homer. The irony being that Bart looked up to Krusty while having no respect for his father. Groening went on to say that nobody really got the connection, so Krusty began to just take on a life of his own instead. You can listen to the archived shows on the NPR website.

http://freshair.npr.org/

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[inode_buddha]

True that we have IBM and Sun; I'm not ignoring them at all, I use both their products. In fact I greatly enjoy seeing them "do Linux".

Whoops, I just caught you comment about FUD; OK, there's lots of that. Most of my post is about how to deal with FUD at a consumer level, where people don't even *know* that there is anything else. And then they find out and think its brand new, or "non-standard" (another rant...) or something equally absurd. So please take the rest of this with a grain of salt, it's not an attack. It's more like frustration.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original post howver. I was just saying that it would be nice to see a "pure linux" play aimed at the mainstream user. Not business, nor business desktop. Just plain users who go buy things at Circuit City, CompUSA, etc. That was why I used Apple as an example. Clearly Apple aimed their iMac ads in this direction.

More recently, I've watched IBM's Linux ads during the football season. They're probably doing well, but how is Joe home user going to relate the big biz feeling to what he's doing? I'm certainly not dissing IBM on this, they're doing what they do best. Mainly, great big stuff IMHO. I just perceive a shortfall elsewhere in the overall Linux PR.

To respond to the other AC who says that "Ads aren't PR": I would say
True, I do it word-of-mouth. But eventually you'll have to fight fire with fire and if that requires TV ads then so be it.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[Anthony Boyd]

I wonder if there are any Linux mad advertising zealots with deep pockets to get some ads on those sites, and to generally kick up a stink and get us lots more stories in the papers and magazines.

I registered linuxmarketing.com a couple weeks ago. My intention is to eventually have press kits, logos, backgrounders, banners, and small button images available for download. I also hope to have a small store with Tux merchandise to help pay for the site, and cover ad costs to promote Linux. But it's slow going. I don't really have "deep pockets" so I do things piecemeal as I have time or a spare $100. But this should do some of what you want. I don't know how quickly it will come online. My respectthepublicdomain.org Web site was online within a day or two of the MPAA launching respectcopyrights.org, but linuxmarketing.com is a LOT bigger project. We'll see.

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[evilWurst]

"And the ad tried to show that Microsoft Windows Server is 11-22% faster in '4 out of 5' workplace scenarios than Linux."

Hmm. 4 out of 5... that's 80%. But supposedly Microsoft has 90%+ of the market. So Microsoft just paid to run an ad urging over 10% of the market to leave them for Linux >:)

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[4of12]

What's interesting about this is the media's role given the high stakes and their dependency on Microsoft's expenditure of ad dollars, giving writers early glimpses of products, etc..

But on one level, I'd guess that computer magazine editors and publishers would be loath to offend a big spender like Microsoft by publishing articles about Linux growth in the enterprise, etc.

And that might be true some places, to some extent.

On a deeper level, a cynic might suggest that computer magazines and web sites that run pro-Linux articles actually increase the need for Microsoft to invest more heavily in its advertising budget to counter the ebb in public opinion.

In the case of the Seattle paper in Microsoft's own backyard, the article probably just helps to gain local readers who are intensely interested in anything having to do with Microsoft, but probably more interested in the bad news because good news is plentiful and boring (MSFT stock price up again, repeat for two decades).

Re: Seattle P-I...

[Anonymous Coward]

now what would REALLY be funny in Seattle is if the Seattle Times ran an article touting only the positive pro-Microsoft spin from the article in reference to Linux to offset the P-I article.

For those that don't know, the Seattle Times and Seattle P-I are almost the same paper. They run off the same presses and share the same classified advertisement group. Supposedly, they operate independently besides that and are under separate ownership...

This is not quite the same as the Chicago Tribune vs. Chicago Sun-Times, which are two different papers that reach two different target audiences in Chicagoland. One is tabloid format, the other isn't. Enough said on that one. It takes about 30 minutes to skim the front few pages and the last few pages (news in the front, classifieds in the middle, sports on the last 7 or 8 pages) a given Sun-Times, and about an hour and a half to make it through the Trib...

Eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't get what's up with the comments.

This is quite the phenomenon.

Re:Eh?

[lintux]

Yeah, welcome to 1996. ;-)

> Companies "couldn't say, 'Maybe I should just choose Linux because there were 52 Slashdot postings saying that Linux is better,' " he said, referring to a popular Web site for technology news and commentary. "That's really what drove a lot of the emphasis to say, 'Hey, fine, let's really give a set of facts.' "

Yeah, well, I just wonder... How well can I trust facts on www.MicroSoft.Com, compared to facts on SlashDot.Org? Considering the number of pro-Windows people here and the number of pro-Linux people there, I think SlashDot is waaaay more reliable! ;-)

Best quote ever...

[ghideon]

"Dan Leach, group product manager for the Microsoft Office System, was asked at the time whether Microsoft would have publicized the results if they hadn't been positive. He answered that he had been so confident in the software's benefits that it "was never going to be a question." Is MS smoking the same stuff that SCO is??!?

Re:Best quote ever...

[beav007]

I would have to assume so...

Re:Best quote ever...

[einhverfr]

"Dan Leach, group product manager for the Microsoft Office System, was asked at the time whether Microsoft would have publicized the results if they hadn't been positive. He answered that he had been so confident in the software's benefits that it "was never going to be a question." Is MS smoking the same stuff that SCO is??!?

Of course they are. MS is probably not intentionally conspiring with SCO to kill Linux. But SCO got their mind-altering stuff from Microsoft and now they seem like they are the same company.

This may sound like a joke, but think about it. MS may not be saying "Hey, SCO, sue IBM!" Instead, the shared delusions are enough that they don't have to-- SCO will be MS's lackey without either one of them having to afferm the relationship in any official way. The SCOX execs get fraudulant profit from it, while MS gets PR. Match made in heaven.

Re:Best quote ever...

[EmagGeek]

Since Microsoft is paying for the stuff SCO is smoking, I would say yes..

Re:Best quote ever...

[Ravenrage]

and you thought Microsoft gave sco money?????

billg:hey darl try some of this

Darl:i don't know bill

billg:come on one taste can't hurt ya

darl:ok(takes some)

billg:man i think linux has some of your code in it

darl:(takes some more) Whooooaaaaaa dude i think ur right

now we just need to find billie's dealer and put a cap in his ass :)

if linux is illegal only hackers will have linux

Must be...

[PHPgawd]

...that Slashdot readers are finally sick commenting on stories about Microsoft and SCO... That must be it...

In other news, recent market studies have a massive decline in the demand for porn on the Internet, and...

Shock horror

[ozric99]

I really don't mean to sound like a troll, but honestly, the day Microsoft pays for and publicises a report in which linux comes out on top will be the day it should get front page headlines. This is just business as usual.

Is it possible to mod Stories as redundant?

Sat here watching my karma go wheeeeeee all the way down ;)

Re:Shock horror

[Felinoid]

This is just business as usual

Only in the technology industry.
This is called "false advertising" and it's not legal but tech companys get away with it becouse few people know better.

Consummer advocates who usually dogpile companys who pull this stunt don't know enough to build a reasonable case against Microsoft. However make no mistake they DO know what is going on they just haven't the time to learn all they'd need to learn before a case could be formulated.

To the general public (and more importantly the managers who deside what technology to use) this is news. They don't realise technology companys have gotten away with false advertising for decades. They don't know it is commen practace today.

If more of this enters the news companys will give Linux a fair shake. That dosen't mean they'll adopt Linux but it dose mean they'll make the choice based on research they do themselfs rather than on data Microsoft force feeds them.

It also means you'll see more hybred networks with Linux, Solarus, BSD and Macintosh deploied along with Windows where needed (if needed).

Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

First of all, any vendor TCO study is going to be completely bullshit. However, there's a glimmer of truth in the Microsoft stuff:

+ Realistically, the software & hardware costs aren't going to be significantly different between Windows and Linux. Yes, you can download Linux for free, but your boss is going to pay real money for RedHat or SuSE.

+ Unix admins are more expensive than Windows admins, although they generally have a much higher skill level. Maybe as Linux penetrates the market, this will equalize (both in cost and skill level).

+ MS selected specific scenerios to favor them. For example, File and Print have never been a strong spot for Unix -- Novell and MS have owned that segement for years and years. It will be interesting to see what Novell/SuSE puts on the market.

And attacking Linux on Mainframes is like hitting the broad side of a barn -- There might be some scenarios where it makes sense, but for the most part a mainframe has pathetic price/performance and is very expensive to keep running. (Although, that wouldn't stop IBM from selling you one.)

And as for J2EE -- some of the tools are ridiclously expensive, so that's a pretty easy cost study to rig.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Spillman]

Unix admins are more expensive than Windows admins, although they generally have a much higher skill level. Maybe as Linux penetrates the market, this will equalize (both in cost and skill level).

I always laugh at the "windows staff is cheaper" stuff. I seriously can't believe the number of people who buy this. It's so blatently obvious that windows staff is cheap. Supply and demand IMHO. More companies use windows so there is more of a need for windows techs, and dare i admit it, there is not much need for skill in the windows market. I know how to stuff ranging from the mundane to the administering on both windows and linux, and even though I think linux is more powerful and practical, many tasks are easier to do on windows. But what do you expect?

I really laugh at the number of people who use windows and think they are getting a deal when they could be using linux or another open source alternative instead. I'm certain that if linux got more advertising it would totally stomp windows in the business market. Do we reall want IBM marketing linux? Look what happened to OS/2.

Re:Not entirely BS

[BiggerIsBetter]

Yep, J2EE is ridiculously expensive. I mean, just check out these figures...

JBoss Appserver - Cost: $0.00
IBM 1.4 JDK for Linux x86 - Cost: $0.00
Eclipse IDE - Cost: $0.00

Re:Not entirely BS

[EmagGeek]

Something to keep in mind with the Windows Admin cost vs. Linux Admin cost is this: Any moron can administer a Windows box. Why? Because Windows doesn't give you control over anything. Linux gives you control over every little detail of how a box runs, so naturally a *nix admin has to know more stuff than a windows admin does.

After all, there aren't any "Wizards" living in your Linux box....

Re:Not entirely BS

[millahtime]

"+ Realistically, the software & hardware costs aren't going to be significantly different between Windows and Linux. Yes, you can download Linux for free, but your boss is going to pay real money for RedHat or SuSE."

Yes, you will pay real money for them but Windows XP Pro is $300 compared to Redhat at $180 is still a cost savings. A $120 savings per machine can add up quickly and doesn't even take office software into account.

"+ Unix admins are more expensive than Windows admins, although they generally have a much higher skill level. Maybe as Linux penetrates the market, this will equalize (both in cost and skill level)."

It takes less unix admins than windows admins. I have worked on both sides of the fence and in my experience it takes less unix admins. They may cost more per admin but it takes less to do the same job.

"+ MS selected specific scenerios to favor them. For example, File and Print have never been a strong spot for Unix -- Novell and MS have owned that segement for years and years. It will be interesting to see what Novell/SuSE puts on the market."

Have you looked at Samba 3 as how it compares to microsoft windows 2003 for file sharing....in independent tests it was reported to be 2.5 times faster at the same activities (this was reported on /.)

They make points but sometimes you have to look deeper. They may look good to the untrained eye but aren't really that great of points.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great if you're putting up your mom's recipes on a toy website, but what about a real site where you have to actually employ people which cost more than $0.00 and you want enterprise-level storage, databases, load balancing, redundancy/reliability, AND you actually want some support for this system from vendors. The real enterprise stuff is expensive.

Re:Not entirely BS

[michaelggreer]

What are you talking about? Sure, the databases are expensive, but the subject is J2EE, not databases. If you mean Weblogic, then I have to disagree: it is a dog compared to the free or inexpensive (Resin) solutions. Never have known Bea to have good support either. That "enterprise" talk is for management, not us.

Re:Not entirely BS

[sweede]

$300? for Windows Xp ?

you need to find a different store.

Newegg has it for $139.00
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?desc ription=37-102-143&depa=6

i can hear it now "but but you gotta buy it with hardware !!"

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?desc ription=12-102-104&depa=0

"You can use this item to satisfy any Product that has *Must be Purchased with Hardware!!* Requirement.
Free with any Microsoft Software Purchase "

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you do any work on big internet sites?

If all you need is the stuff so you can use J2EE APIs, then yes you can get it cheap or free. I'm talking about an actual J2EE system's cost for a non-trivial web site.

J2EE is just a part of a real "solution". That you can get the Eclipse IDE for free doesn't have much bearing on what the TCO for a J2EE system is going to be. A J2EE system typically needs web servers, app servers, databases, directories, and possibly messaging. There are storage issues, backup issues, and redundancy issues, among others. Resin might work great in a J2EE system, but most companies are going to want an actual support contract for it which is not free. So when somebody says J2EE is available cheap, I have to disagree because J2EE can't exist without these other (expensive) pieces for a serious large system.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

and dare i admit it, there is not much need for skill in the windows market.

Really I don't think that's true as much as people NEED skilled Windows people, but can do without them. Besides which it's typically really hard to tell the difference between a good windows admin and a bad one when you are hiring them.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, there's a difference between an IDE drive in your PC and an (enterprise-level) EMC disk storage system.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Znork]

"And attacking Linux on Mainframes is like hitting the broad side of a barn"

It's fairly tragic really. For these studies they've probably commissioned another dozen or so that have turned up the cost advantages of Linux, or they would have had some more relevant studies there.

What's next? An Earth based Windows Server 2003 is cheaper to buy than an x86 Linux based Mars lander?

What studies arent there really say more than the ones that are.

Re:Not entirely BS

[millahtime]

wow, it has a 5 star rating there. Isn't the world fooled with what a good OS is.

Re:Not entirely BS

[man_of_mr_e]

Yes, you will pay real money for them but Windows XP Pro is $300 compared to Redhat at $180 is still a cost savings. A $120 savings per machine can add up quickly and doesn't even take office software into account.

You really don't know much about corporate pricing, do you? Most companies spend about $150 or less per seat for the OS

Re:Not entirely BS

[Haeleth]

Any moron can administer a Windows box. Why? Because Windows doesn't give you control over anything.

That, on the other hand, is entirely BS. Windows gives fine-grained control over most behaviour. Any moron can administer Windows, sure, but in my experience it's very easy to tell whether a given Windows network is administered by a moron or not.

Please restrict your comments to subjects you actually have knowledge of.

Re:Not entirely BS

[michaelggreer]

I'm sorry, I was a little abrupt. I have built major sites for Dunn & Bradstreet, Hitachi, Mitsui, and others. What I meant was that the expense is not in J2EE, but in the others you mention (databases, backup, redundancy). App servers (and, of course, web servers) are not the cost. I have worked with Weblogic and Websphere, and have been unimpressed. For one, I am not impressed by EJBs (and I am not alone). I just have not found costly J2EE solutions to be better than inexpensive or open source J2EE solutions, support included. So, my point again, J2EE is not in itself costly as a platform.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that millah as in Miller?

Lay off the beer man, it consumes huge amounts on your braincells to disappear.

In other words: STFU you Mac Fanboy!

Re:Not entirely BS

[oldgeezer1954]

"+ Realistically, the software & hardware costs aren't going to be significantly different between Windows and Linux."

Except for small business i disagree with that assumption. Once you factor in the cost of CALS and applications the cost difference can be substantial. I guess where you can buy a license for win2k server, for example, and not have to buy a boatload of cals you might have a point. And we won't get into office....

"There might be some scenarios where it makes sense, but for the most part a mainframe has pathetic price/performance"

Price/performance isn't what push people into the mainframe market so the point is moot.

Re:Not entirely BS

[blinkylights]

++ Unix admins are more expensive than Windows admins, although they generally have a much higher skill level. Maybe as Linux penetrates the market, this will equalize (both in cost and skill level)."

+It takes less unix admins than windows admins. I have worked on both sides of the fence and in my experience it takes less unix admins. They may cost more per admin but it takes less to do the same job.

It's been my experience that admins cost about the same for Unix/Linux or Windows. Now, it's easier to find "admins" with a cert and no experience willing to work for less as a Windows admin. But the good ones are just as expensive, and no more numerous than good Unix admins. As a Linux admin, I have an enormous amount of respect for these people, frankly: it's as you pointed out: their jobs are a hell of a lot harder than mine.

That's why these "studies" seem so transparently bogus to me. They're obviously using the lowest salary you can find for an admin rather than the salary for the quality of Windows admin you need to actually keep your Windows boxes running as smoothly as Linux... or for the overtime you'll have to pay them for the 2-3 major Windows security crises you'll face this year.

Re:Not entirely BS

[poot_rootbeer]

Do we reall want IBM marketing linux? Look what happened to OS/2.

IBM didn't really market OS/2, though. They just kind of made it available for sale.

In fact, one could argue that by Warp 3, the first real marketing push the OS got, IBM already knew the product had a limited amount of time left and were just trying to maximize their ROI before Windows 95 got released a few months later and pushed OS/2 out of the market.

Re:Not entirely BS

[GooberToo]

I have to cry BS here.

Realistically, the software & hardware costs aren't going to be significantly different between Windows and Linux. Yes, you can download Linux for free, but your boss is going to pay real money for RedHat or SuSE

Many small to medium size businesses do not purchase Linux. They have their techie download and install it. Cost zero. Furthermore, since you can do more with less hardware, when you run Linux, many people recycle older boxes (cost zero) or buy smaller boxes with better raid or storage facilities. So, generally speaking, you either get more for your buck or outright save on hardware.

Unix admins are more expensive than Windows admins, although they generally have a much higher skill level. Maybe as Linux penetrates the market, this will equalize (both in cost and skill level).

Last several studies I've seen show that Unix admins tend to be on par with Windows admins. In shops where it differs, on average, there is only a 10% difference. Seems more experienced Unix admins, on average, are either being under paid or, more often from my own experience, win admins are being over paid, far, far too much. I'm sorry, I've yet to meet a win admin that's worth 70-120K. Yet, some companies pay it.

MS selected specific scenerios to favor them. For example, File and Print have never been a strong spot for Unix -- Novell and MS have owned that segement for years and years. It will be interesting to see what Novell/SuSE puts on the market.

From a performance perspective, Samba is mopping the floor, last I heard. So, I not sure why anyone would pick windows here.

And as for J2EE -- some of the tools are ridiclously expensive, so that's a pretty easy cost study to rig.

Nonsense. Java is cheap. There are a ton of free, high quality tools to do Java development. For the most part, you have develope an entire java toolset, of commercial quality and highly regarded, for free.

In a nutshell, Linux is always going to be cheaper, faster, and more versitile.

Re:Not entirely BS

[GooberToo]

Get real. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Want enterprise storage? Get PostgreSQL for free or fork up the money for Oracle. But then again, neither of those are Java, now are they.

The real enterprise stuff is expensive.

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Stuff? What stuff? I thought we were talking about Java?

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

How soon people forget the OS/2 Fiesta Bowl.

<jingle>
It's a better Windows than Windows you knooow
It's Ohh Ess Two Two Point Ohhhhhhh
</jingle>

OS/2 had a monsterous marketing budget -- you are talking crap.

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

Hence the magic word "some". Sure IBM will let you download Eclipse, but they will also sell you "WebSphere Enterprise Developer Studio" at a price so expensive they refuse to list it on their website.

Last I checked, the 'official' prices for BEA or WebSphere were something like $10,000 per developer.

Sorta like how you can do MS dev for free, or you can drop $3000 for MSDN & VisualStudio.

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

Hi -- I don't want to argue Microsoft's side too strenuously, but most of your counter-points are pretty shallow.

Windows XP Pro is $300 compared to Redhat at $180 is still a cost savings
Redhat ELWS is $180 Per Year, versus $300 (retail, which nobody pays) for XPPro for a 5 year support window. Not hard to figure out which is cheaper.

They may cost more per admin but it takes less to do the same job.
And that's the fun of doing TCO studies! Microsoft's numbers disagree with you, so a PHB is going to want to see a TCO study proving your assertation.

What I've noticed in places that I've worked is that the Windows and Unix people are doing very different things in different ways, so it's difficult to make an Apples to Apples comparison. Check out this article -- it that argues a cheaper Unix network "removes the user empowerment" Windows networks have. Which basically means the Unix Admin can do more because the users can do less.

in independent tests [Samba]was reported to be 2.5 times faster
Last thing people are worried about is speed. It's really the management tools.

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

In a nutshell, Linux is always going to be cheaper, faster, and more versitile.

I'll just point out that by starting with the conclusion and working backwards, you are doing the exact same thing Microsoft is.

Re:Not entirely BS

[DunbarTheInept]

File and Print have never been a strong spot for Unix

For printing, yes. For file sharing, no. For file sharing, which OS is best is fully dependant on which OS is on the client machines. Trying to use a Windows machine as a file server for a unix client sucks even worse than trying to use a unix machine as a file server for a Windows client. So the 'winner' has nothing to do with the actual file server. Whichever server is identical to the clients and therefore stores all the same kinds of file permissions, flags, and whatnot, ends up winning the contest. Regardless of whether it is better or worse overall, it is a closer match to what the client machines need.

So, if you report "Most clients are Windows machines" as a seperate item from "Windows file servers work better", you are being deceptive. They are in fact the same thing. The second is merely a direct consequence of the first.

Re:Not entirely BS

[unoengborg]

JBoss is somewhat harder to configure and deploy applications to than e.g. IBM Websphere. That will raise the costs somewhat.

However the situation is improving, at least when it comes to deployment, by useing a nice plugin for eclipes called lomboz (www.lomboz.org) development, debugging and deployment is significantly simplyfied.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeh, my IDE hardrive doesn't give random faults that nobody can diagnose...

Re:Not entirely BS

[Qzukk]

Sorta like how you can do MS dev for free, or you can drop $3000 for MSDN & VisualStudio.

Whoa, I'll take that free, where do I get it?

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

msdn.microsoft.com.
Download the NET SDK to get compilers
Download the Windows SDK to get headers
Use the included EDLIN program to code your masterpiece.

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of the directory and management tools that come with Netware and Windows. No Unix is currently competing with this stuff. And NFS? Yuck. (real authentication was added when? three years ago?)

Re:Not entirely BS

[Qzukk]

Thanks, I didn't realize I didn't have to buy visual studio just to play around with this stuff.

Re:Not entirely BS

[Moofie]

I hope when you built Dun & Bradstreet's web site, you spelled their name correctly.

I also hope you didn't build their first public website, because then I shall have to hunt you down and kill you in your sleep, because I had to answer the phone when your web site broke. Which was frequently.

*toothy grin*

Re:Not entirely BS

[michaelggreer]

Luckily, no, not their website!

Re:Not entirely BS

[DunbarTheInept]

Directory services are not necessary outside of Windows. It's a tool that solves a non-existant problem in the unix world.

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

If that's what you think, why don't you go tell the people who invented NIS, or the OpenLDAP developers?

Re:Not entirely BS

[DunbarTheInept]

tell the people who invented NIS

Which, since it already was present in the unix world, fits under my claim that Directory services solves a problem unix doesn't have. (It already had NIS.)

Next you'll be telling me that Unix is defficient at showing you what's running on the system, and that's why they had to create the 'ps' program.

Re:Not entirely BS

[NutscrapeSucks]

Get your story straight and then get back to me, ok?

Re:Not entirely BS

[DunbarTheInept]

Repeat the last two posts.
Done.

Bias aside

[Kolinar]

Given the "LINUX performance analysis" from Microsoft in the past, I tend believe these "independent reports" are more or less propaganda. Bias aside, I think the point is made, that the problem isn't whether Microsoft attempted to influence the reports or not, but rather the fact that Microsoft sponsored the study puts (conscious or unconscious) pressure on the analysts performing the study to be bias one way or another.

It is the same reason why drug companies need to perform double blind testing on new medicine to see whether the effects are merely due to influence from the people performing the study and the patients being told that they would get better.

similarly, though Microsoft may demand that the reports be objective, the analysts employed may just by association, subconsciously put Microsoft products in a slightly better light.

indeed

[themusicgod1]

mabye the ms goons have got everyone. seriously though. there's talk of a microsoft pr war. what to do in case of pr war? KEEP USING LINUX. keep yourself well fed. if something is totally annoying about linux, fix it! if you don't know how(like me) start getting chest deep in README's, manpages, HOWTO's and whatnot. and if your not a geek, beg a geek to help you, or use BSD or something, which due to academic interests will never die out completely.

hit the wave head on, and don't break. after all, even if microsoft ever does create a supperior OS, it won't matter. we have the highground, and they have no intent of taking it. Freedom, my peers, is what we have chosen. Computers do what we, their owners and commanders tell them to...and freedom means the freedom to know what other people have told our computers to do. No more spyware imbedded into our software! no more fucking buggy windows 98 crash ten times in one session bullshit...i don't care if XP is more stable than this, we know they are capable of this, and they will fall back to this in the future. Their software may become worse with time, but should Linux ever go truly bad, we can always take a few steps back

'2.13.5 sucks soo badly mostly since linus got addicted to heroin? we're bout to start a fork back at 2.9.3 where it was still descent' and we can do this! do you think we're ever going to be able to fork windows 95?
and most importantly, don't let yourself be beaten down to far, after all, what is more impressive, a bunch of broke MS developers who are fighting over the few thousand jobs available (all at microsoft)...or a linux user with all sorts of cool and unthought of applications that will only occur to us in the next decade or two? of course there isn't really such a black and white comparison here but the spectrum of choice...but we have nothing to fear. we have the upper hand, and it's going to stay this way for the near future, at least.

Re:indeed

[JollyFinn]

'2.13.5 sucks soo badly mostly since linus got addicted to heroin? we're bout to start a fork back at 2.9.3 where it was still descent' and we can do this! do you think we're ever going to be able to fork windows 95?

Hey 2.13.5 sucks, but why to hell you wan't to go 2.9.3, both of them are unstable versions, fork the stable release not just some beta crap either 2.8.6 or 2.10.5 .

Re:indeed

[Dogtanian]

2.13.5 sucks soo badly mostly since linus got addicted to heroin

Classic quote, folks!

Re:indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

huzzah!

This just in...

[macshune]

It doesn't really matter *who* does the study...the results are almost guaranteed to be biased unless the study is comissioned by a truly independent organization and carried out by a truly independent studying group.

"SCO study proves Linux is built on SCOde."
"Linux study proves SCO is build on false-promises and deception"

hmm...SCOde is now the term one can use when describing copyrighted/poorly written code that might have fallen into a software product.

Usage:

"Dude, there's some SCOde in your program. Check out the variable."
"What variable?"
"$SCO_rocks"
"Crap..."

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dude, there's some SCOde in your program. Check out the variable."
"What variable?"
"$SCO_rocks"

That's obviously faked, it should be $SCO_SUCKS_ASS

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

lets see ... Mitre did an independent study once, funded by a neutral third party: The Pentagon.

I often wonder how often MS will fund an "independent" study, have the results come out not in their favor, and shove it under the carpet and keep the results secret. As another poster mentioned, the studies themselves often set themselves up in MS's favor right from the get-go (eg, differing hardware, "Linux is mainly used for print, web, and ftp", etc)

Re:This just in...

[m00nun1t]

And even if it is truly independent, people will argue about the methodology.

Benchmarks, independent or not, are useful as a hazy indicator at best, a waste of electrons at worst.

Re:This just in...

[Tassach]

Pointing out the flaws in research is the essense of peer review and the scientific method. No research, no matter how respected the source, is above criticism.

Re:This just in...

[senatorpjt]

Something like a business or government that is looking to do something?

The local government is doing a "study" here about building a road for $8 million or something like that. That's $8 million just for the study, regardless of whether we even build the road or not. I have to believe that the governments of Munich and so forth have done these sort of studies, and we all know what they came up with.

Re:This just in...

[mpe]

And even if it is truly independent, people will argue about the methodology.

This is part of what is known as the "scientific method". In some cases knowing the methdology is even more important than knowing the results or conclusion. Where the aim is really marketing rather than actual research the conclusion will be pushed, typically without mention of the methodology (sometimes without any results.) To the point where some are simply glorified (and expensive) anecdotes.

Benchmarks, independent or not, are useful as a hazy indicator at best, a waste of electrons at worst.

It is difficult to design a benchmark which accuratly reflects the "real world" for a complex machine. When it comes to software there is the additional complication of software which is optimised to benchmarks.

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you live in Santa Barbara? Our government is doing just that: we have a section of the freeway that goes from 3 lanes down to 2 right before a turn. We are studying the effects of widening the freeway. Even in light traffic, people put on their brake lights before the turn. Add in the narrowing freeway, and you have a hell of a rush hour. Fortunately, it is on the way out of Santa Barbara (i.e. the traffic doesn't impact the people who have the ability to complain), so most locals don't care too much. Still, sad to see so much money pissed away.

It could be worse, I guess. San Diego made many changes to the 5/805 Northbound merge and quite possibly made traffic worse as a result.

Sun and IBM...

[MosesJones]

The IDC study is such rubbish. It talks of Linux developers and ISVs...

And fails to mention the two corporate giants who are backing and rolling out Linux across the globe. Sun and IBM.

Its like talking about the Superbowl, but not mentioning the teams.

Re:Sun and IBM...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

All Windows vs Linux researches are meaningless because of one simple fact: Microsoft has billions available to throw at making Windows better, whereas the Linux community, even with RH and other prominent companies, is rather poor in funding in comparison.

If I was an IT manager, I would consider Linux to follow a "best effort" sort of approach, whereas Windows, being far less than free, should come with guarantees about stability and performance. However, at least in terms of stability and security, Linux certainly outperforms Windows, if not by much these days. And it probably isn't far from Windows in terms of raw speed.

So, basically, those studies compare apples and oranges. In the cycle racing world, if Joe Bike, with no funding, no top-level medical staff and a simple bike, was to finish a race second or third to Lance Armstrong, everybody would herald him as a great hero, and Lance Armstrong's team wouldn't put up a website pointing out Joe Bike's poor performances compared to Lance Armstrong. Fact is, Microsoft has much vaster resources than the Linux community, and only manages to perform marginally better than Linux at best. That's what the studies should show. Throw Microsoft's billions at Linux and Windows would instantly become a laughable joke.

Re:Sun and IBM...

[soloport]

However, at least in terms of [1]stability and [2]security, Linux certainly outperforms Windows, if not by much these days. And it probably isn't far from Windows in terms of raw [3]speed.

Hard to match
1) stability through fever-pitched-bug-fixing (open source) vs. mere self-monitoring-of-doomed-processes.
2) security-by-design vs. security-largely-through-obscurity.
3) the raw speed of having no CPU cycles to have to burn on the GUI becuase you can entirely remove the GUI!

OTOH, Windows makes for a nice workstation. Why not use the right tool for the right job? Can't we all just get along?

Throw Microsoft's billions at Linux and Windows would instantly become a laughable joke.

Uh, in the back office and in the data center, Windows is a lughable joke. (Yes, most data centers tout Windows, but that's because customers demand it.)

Re:Sun and IBM...

[sharkey]

Its like talking about the Superbowl, but not mentioning the teams.

Sounds like they took lessons from the Simpsons. This way, they can just re-use the same episode, err, study over and over and over.

Re:Sun and IBM...

[debrain]

Your analogy, though fruitful in some respects, does not hold over thoroughly to software development. It is a commonly accepted axiom among experienced commercial teams that adding people to the team does not ship the product faster. In that light, throwing money at problems need not produce solutions. The problem seems to be that professional programmers are not immediately useful in a project, requiring ramp-up time.

In the open source world, however, the incentives and results are very different. Many people know about a project and follow it for significant periods of time before contributing, and feel fairly comfortable by osmosis with the code. As well, the contributions are much closer to the needs of the user, since the developers are almost always the users. This is very much not the case in commercial development.

Finally, the release structure of open source is a stark contrast to commercial releases. One can see this in the half-implemented features that indicate closed source programs released before the developers finished their jobs. This is not a signature of open source, however, which tends to release on feature completeness, not business forces.

Though I cannot argue with the potential for large amounts of money to produce software of a different calibre, I am not sold that this is a consistently better calibre of software. I think it is a problem endemic to the production of commercial software, and that ultimately the process through which open source is developed makes it privy to resources the likes of which cannot be reproduced in a commercial setting.

Re:Sun and IBM...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its like talking about the Superbowl, but not mentioning the teams.

How could this comment get modded up? He goes and brings up the Superbowl and doesn't even mention the teams!

Re:Sun and IBM...

[ChaosDiscord]

...Windows, being far less than free, should come with guarantees about stability and performance.

Yes, yes it should.

.

Fortunately I'm used to being disappointed.

Well Guh!

[Greyfox]

Microsoft funded studies have been popping up since my OS/2 days. They all have some things in common: They seem to try to obscure the fact that the study was funded by Microsoft, they all come to favorable conclusions based on questionable premises and they all seem to end up on a forum like this one, with everyone calling shennanagans.

Studies are a marketing device for Microsoft. We may as well get used to being on the sharp end of their marketing department's pointed stick.

Re:A record

[Concerned Onlooker]

It would have been until you posted....

I shouldn't even post this

[2Bits]

I've refrained from posting on any garbage like that forever, but since not much people are posting (sick of it already, or too busy combing thru all the reports?), I'll chip it one.

Disclaimer: I've not read all the reports, just the article and the IDC report.

Microsoft's Taylor said that findings are also presented in such a way that they can be duplicated by others. I'm not sure. The reasoning for the quantification method is weird at best. On p.10 of the IDC report, every item for Linux is more expensive.

Let's take hardware. The hardware for Linux is more expensive because it is assumed that for the same hardware, Linux can handle less load than Windows, therefore, you need more hardware if you deploy Linux, hence higher cost. That's weird, how did they come up with that assumption? It's certainly not explained in the "open methodology".

Software: how did they come to the conclusion that Linux softwares are more expensive? I can't find the list of comparable softwares they used in their study. If this methodology is really open, let's provide the data, shall we? And they claim that Linux is used mostly for print, file serving, and web serving. Well, if that's the case, the softwares for those functionalities cost almost nothing, except for support, which is more or less the same for both platform. How come I remember I used to pay thousands of dollars for a Windows Server allowing only 5 connections?

Staffing: Sure, Linux/Unix admin are more expensive. That's true only if you assume that each Linux/Unix admin can only do the same amount of work as an MCSE monkey. You draw your own conclusion.

Downtime: Whoa, Linux cost more for downtime (in a couple of cases)? Real data please?

Training: That, I'm not sure. It's probably easier to pick up Windows, as every new kid is already familiar (more or less) with windows interface already, before the training? Ok, let's say the data here are correct, but I still want data.

Outsourcing: I can't seem to understand how did they come up with that conclusion. I'd like to see the raw data.

The funny thing is this: the report said that Linux is used only for "light workload on the edge", and not for the real stuff.

Hmm, I guess they didn't talk to the CIO of amazon.com (hint: based on their previous experience with Linux for other things with a $16M cost savings, they are moving their mission-critical terabyte database to Linux!)

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[LordK2002]

The hardware for Linux is more expensive because it is assumed that for the same hardware, Linux can handle less load than Windows, therefore, you need more hardware if you deploy Linux, hence higher cost. That's weird, how did they come up with that assumption? It's certainly not explained in the "open methodology".

This is a fundamental flaw in logic known as "begging the question" - by assuming what you want to prove and then "proving" your conclusion based on that incorrect assumption.

I.E. "Linux is less cost-effective in performance than Windows, therefore you need more expensive hardware to run it, therefore you have to spend more to achieve the same performance, therefore Linux is less cost-effective in performance than Windows."

If this is truly what they are saying, then I would be tempted to dismiss the whole campaign as illogical garbage.

K

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[rokzy]

I haven't bothered reading the report, but reading your summary reminded me of Vietnam. when fixing the election results the U.S. advisors suggested a more realistic value but they went for something like 99% instead.

contrary to Hitler's "the bigger the lie, the easier they swallow it", putting out BS of this magnitude is retarded.

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is this: the report said that Linux is used only for "light workload on the edge", and not for the real stuff.

mp3.com was one of the top 10 visited sites for a long time and they ran on LAMP (Linux).

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Our department migrated a VR project to Linux because there were too many un-reproducable problems under NT. Identical hardware using identical setups would behave differently under identical conditions. After migrating to Linux, development time shrank because not only did the particular hardware issue disappear (oddly enough on the same hardware) when strange things did happen we could pour through the core dumps.

When I took control of the network, I insisted we use Linux for all of our mission critical applications. It took a bit of convincing, but we went ahead and setup up our basic network facilities using Linux. About the same time the Samba group developed the means to operate a Domain controller under Linux, and we set up a brand new domain and slowly moved everyones little fief domain to the main system.

In all that time our biggest outages have been power failures, hardware failures, and good old fashion human error. I can't say any of our mission critical boxes have been down for more than 4 or 5 hours at a time over the course of 6 years. Major events are about 6 months apart.

I've had 4 intrusions to our servers. One was a cracker who rooted a DNS server back in 1999. One was a Linux worm that snuck onto our email server 2002. The remaining 2 are to a Win2K server that runs a MSSql database. One time someone busted through a share and filled the hard drive with French-Language DIVX movies. They other was one of those nasty worms that infects through the RPC port.

For hosting a million hit/day website on our network for a .edu that's not doing bad.

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[molarmass192]

It's funny, whenever I read a Martin Taylor interview I'm always reminded of Colin Powell sitting in front of the UN making that WMD presentation. They both knew damn well their facts were nothing but bullshit but they had to cover their bosses asses regardless.

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[Florian Weimer]

Software: how did they come to the conclusion that Linux softwares are more expensive? I can't find the list of comparable softwares they used in their study.

I looked at one study and they used proprietary databases and application servers/middleware. You could easily run such infrastructure on top of a proprietary UNIX or Windows operating system. It doesn't matter much from a TCO or political point of view. On the server, these components contribute strongly to the lock-in effect, and not the underlying operating system. A comparison to a LAMP solution would be far more interesting, but it's also extremely difficult to do in a meaningful way.

Microsoft is quite clever in this regard: they compare traditional, proprietary environments on Linux and Windows in such studies (which certainly the right thing to do because to most business people, "Linux" just means "not Microsoft", and not "freedom"), and at the same time help prospective customers to move their Apache/PHP/MySQL applications to Windows (running on Apache/PHP/MySQL, of course).

Re:I shouldn't even post this

[Anonymous Coward]

Downtime: Whoa, Linux cost more for downtime (in a couple of cases)? Real data please?

Of course Linux cost more for downtime. If amazon or someone elses servers go down it costs major $$$, but how much does it really cost in downtime when a windows user is waiting for a ctrl-alt-del to finish? And we know that nobody in their right mind would be stupid enough to have a site they count on for $$ to be running windows.

This wasn't even *supposedly* objective

[SlashDotAgent]

The "get-the-facts" sub-website is part of M$'s campaign againts Linux.
Like in every campaign, reasearches supporting it are quoted.
They do not even claim that all researches came to that conclusion, but rather just show that ones that did.

Re:This wasn't even *supposedly* objective

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The "get-the-facts" sub-website is part of M$'s campaign againts Linux. Like in every campaign, reasearches supporting it are quoted.

No? Really? That's dishonest! I honestly thought they were candid about the whole issue.

Would that be why RedHat doesn't have any pro-Windows study on their website? I wonder ...

I think this is great news...

[jkrise]

Just 30 posts so far, hours after an article on MS is put up on Slashdot. Guess it implies that study reports (funded, sponsored, sexed-up, or otherwise) carry little weightage with IT consumers, these days.

This could explain why Linux adoption continues to increase despite all the media hype and study reports - users and organisations are probly doing the study reports themselves..... consumers getting wiser is a highly undesirable phenomenon for the Corporat types - I think we'll soon see Ask Slashdot article on "How to Keep the Consumer Stupid?"
-

Re:I think this is great news...

[fritz1968]

Just 30 posts so far, hours after an article on MS is put up on Slashdot. Guess it implies that study reports (funded, sponsored, sexed-up, or otherwise) carry little weightage with IT consumers, these days.

naaaa! For once, everyone on slashdot decided to "Read The F&%$#@ Article" (RTFA) before posting.

Re:I think this is great news...

[poot_rootbeer]

Just 30 posts so far, hours after an article on MS is put up on Slashdot.

You posted this @3:56AM. Did you expect an immediate deluge of comments?

If Linux is really so bad...

[Flyboy Connor]

...why the hell does Microsoft need to campaign so much against it? It is not as if Linux is campaigning to push Microsoft out of the market, is it? If Linux becomes a big player, it will only be because of its merits. And Microsoft claims the merits aren't there. So what are they worried about?

Re:If Linux is really so bad...

[primus_sucks]

Like the Ghandi quote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Linux has already won on the server, next the desktop.

Re:If Linux is really so bad...

[doodleboy]

Microsoft is scared shitless of linux. They know as well as anyone that linux is faster, cheaper, more reliable, less prone to vendor lock-in, etc., and they know their customers know it too.

Since everyone knows they're lying anyway, Microsoft's black PR campaign will end up giving linux the exposure it can't afford to give itself. Maybe it will hold back the tide for a bit. Who knows? But software commoditization is inevitable if Microsoft fails in its bid to Xbox the PC platform.

There's an extremely good chance that Microsoft will be forced to be more competitive in pricing, stability, openness of interfaces, etc. Great for us, bad for them.

Re:If Linux is really so bad...

[polyp2000]

A few comments, questions for discussion.

Well, I was just thinking along lines and wondering if Microsoft are guilty of this grand scale of FUD, as they have been with other operating systems in the past?

Im sure Microsoft will claim Linux userbase is insignificant. But it must be starting to make a dent in their revenue streams why else would they be taking it so seriously.

I wonder if the issue isnt wholly with Linux, but also with the prevalation of other Open Source projects such as OpenOffice and Apache etc.

What is the real demographic? And just how hard is it hitting the Redmond Army ?

Are they attacking Linux because it is a breeding ground for other free products?

Maybe its not linux itself , but the forward thinking free spirited community of open-ness they are so eager to destroy?

nick ...

52?

[Red Pointy Tail]

Companies "couldn't say, 'Maybe I should just choose Linux because there were 52 Slashdot postings saying that Linux is better,' " he said, referring to a popular Web site for technology news and commentary. "That's really what drove a lot of the emphasis to say, 'Hey, fine, let's really give a set of facts.' "

Did they miss out the 000,000 somewhere?

Re:52?

[nnnneedles]

It's official: MS fears us.

I bet they're reading this.

Hello Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Martin Taylor.

Send me a hundred thousand dollars and I will start posting in favor of windows.

It's a good deal and you know it!

Thanks.

Ironic...

[TheWanderingHermit]

When I opened up the page for the article, the banner ad on top was for the MSN Smart Watch.

I wonder, with random ad placements in banners, if there will eventually be a requirement that ads don't show up on pages with content saying something less than favorable about the advertiser...

Silver lining is good for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU on the front page! They say any publicity is good publicity. And microsoft payed for it too.

Thanks to Microsoft the word is getting out.

[Interruach]

Wee! Free publicity!
According to one of the papers, Microsoft servers are better than linux in 4 out of 5 times.
That means that at least 1 in 5 servers should be running linux by microsoft's own research!

It's nice to see Microsoft finally using their marketing for Good.

Re:Thanks to Microsoft the word is getting out.

[segmond]

It's really funny that you mentioned this, we really should find more things like this and turn it around on them.

Microsoft PR war?

[PatrickThomson]

Everyone in my family is an average consumer, which means they equate Microsoft with computers, and that Windows is the only OS out there. The microsoft PR war, if it happens, will cause the following effect.

"Hrrm... according ot this article, linux is bad"
"What's linux?"
"let's MSN Patrick, he'll know"

See where this is going? Nerds, adopt as many newbs/idiots as you can, and educate!

Re:Microsoft PR war?

[Bagels]

Far more likely, they'll Google linux. And frankly, what comes up right now won't leave the best impression - MyDoom is bad press for linux, and it's currently the top news article involving linux. The sites that show up (such as linux.org) give a too-technical description that's just plain not a good introduction to linux for newbs.

Re:Microsoft PR war?

[Wudbaer]

Just that your average consumer will not even read the article. As soon as the cognitive process decodes "WARNING ! COMPUTER BABBLE AHEAD !" they will automagically skip the article, be it on the front page or somewhere else and go "HEY ! LOOK ! is having a baby !"

Re:Microsoft PR war?

[Wudbaer]

Just that your average consumer will not even read the article. As soon as the cognitive process decodes "WARNING ! COMPUTER BABBLE AHEAD !" they will automagically skip the article, be it on the front page or somewhere else and go "HEY ! LOOK ! "Insert favorite female celebrity here" is having a baby !"

(*Argh* 2nd try, the damn thing though the stuff now in quotes being in brackets before was an exotic HTML tag and skipped it)

Re:Microsoft PR war?

[Anonymous Coward]

I reckon the way it goes is

orgs install linux
employees / consumers use linux all day
they look for the same thing when they go home

Re:Microsoft PR war?

[krumms]

Interesting, unrelated side note prompted by your sig - Although www.sco.com is not at the top of the search results for litigious bastards, it's interesting to note that Caldera is!

Re:Microsoft PR war?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you think the 2nd post was smarter or funnier or whatnot?

You think the rest of the readers of /. are THAT stupid and cannot fill in the gap for them selves?

Or do you fear to be flamed over the missing part?

What IS it with you? Please let Slashdot know. We are very interested.

finally!

[Jacek Poplawski]

Their website doesn't work. At least link to article. After so many years we finally found way to destroy Microsoft. All you need to do is post more MS-related stories, and see how their servers die.

PS. Windows is better than Linux in 4 on 5 scenarios, but I always hit in that last scenario.

Re:finally!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Their website doesn't work. At least link to article. After so many years we finally found way to destroy Microsoft.

No no, it's SCO redirecting port 80 of www.sco.com to www.microsoft.com to deflect the attack of the MyDoom virus. They still haven't quite figured out why their network load just doubled though ...

Re:finally!

[juan2074]

Scenario 5: everything else

Intregrated solution?

[Bender Unit 22]

I like Linux myself and I do use it alot. But to me it stil misses one thing.

When you install a Novell server or a Microsoft server these days, you get Directory Services with them both. You have the possibility of integrated groupware products that works together with the the Directory Services just like file serving, print services, internet access and alot more, all controlled from one system. Specially Novell have made a great system for centralized management of decentralized serveres, and I as far as I can see, MS have begun to understand that concept too now.
But with Linux, you have to build all of this yourself, There's a lot more work that needs to be done before it can replace MS servers. You don't just grab a distro, install it from the CD and then you have the same functionality.

I would like to see it however, but I have yet to see anyone focus at replacing MS servers on the LAN for internal services, and unless you are a big company, people would rather buy a solution that has all those features instead of you developing it yourself.

Re:Intregrated solution?

[digitalunity]

Everything you want may be coming. I'm assuming Novell purchased SuSe with the intent of integrating Netware into Linux. If that happens, we'll probably see a large groundswell of people migrate. There are a lot of companies out there using Netware still and I'm sure a lot of them would switch to Linux for a whole lot of reasons.

The combined strength(technological and financial) of IBM and Novell should give Linux a corporate presence it's never experienced before. Netware for Linux would really give it a desktop presence for corporations because they would be easy to integrate and administer.

Re:Intregrated solution?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Um, last I checked at the end of the day you still had to know what the hell you were doing, regardless of the interface.

A GUI can't design a network topology. A wizard can't devise a security policy. A paperclip can't design a firewall that works for your particular setup. Can they candy-coat the configuration process? Sure. But if you don't know the concepts and limitations of GRE versus IPSEC while working on a network with at NAT firewall across a hostile network that blocks most of the VPN ports you are shit out of luck.

Yes, the Linux interface isn't pretty. But it gets the job done.

Re:Intregrated solution?

[jadel]

Netware 7 will ship with the Linux kernel as an option, from 8 onwards it will be linux only.
Novell is currently in the process of integrating Ximians Red Carpet with the Zenworks desktop management product so patches can be rolled out to linux machines automatically.
If you want to use a pure open source solution your probably best off with LDAP and Samba. Samba can now operate as a PDC in a windows environment and full active directory support is currently being developed.
The only thing missing for me is good support for NCPFS over TCP/IP.

Re:Intregrated solution?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I would also like to point out that there are several HOWTO's designed to assist you set up a directory service. You have your choice of LDAP, NIS, or MySQL.

Personally, I use MySQL. It handles our web-based intranet, email accounts, NT domain accounts, and a bunch of in-house databases. Most open-source security tools have plug-ins for the major directory service systems. Between them, google, and the Gentoo and LinuxUser web forums I crafted a working system.

I do have to disclose that in the process I did do a lot of toolsmithing in TCL. Then again, this is a 200 person network serving between 1000-3000 emails a day. It's not a huge operation, but if things don't work, it can get ugly fast.

Re:Intregrated solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with NetWare/NDS comes seat licencing, and there goes any cost advantage that Linux may have.

But existing NetWare customers are used to paying Novell a lot of money and they will really have no choice but to move to Linux in the future.

Re:Intregrated solution?

[juan2074]

If only Novell offers NDS at a decent price (and we could put it on a Linux system to run directory services for the whole company). . .

The important thing will be pricing NDS as a stand-alone product without cannibalising Netware sales.

Perhaps you're missing the point

[qortra]

To me, the content of the story is not the interesting item here; it's the fact that a well known publication in Microsoft's own stomping grounds is publishing a story like this; I for one am very proud of them.

Keep up the good work SeatlePI and Todd Bishop.

Re:Perhaps you're missing the point

[MatthewB79]

In regards to this being "Microsoft's own stomping grounds" I can tell you (as a resident of Redmond Washington) that despite the huge amount of people here employed by Microsoft Corp., there are many other people (working for Eddie Bauer, Safeco, Nintendo, etc.) who are just as interested in other operating systems as they are in Windows. You just see a lot more Windows XP T-shirts walking around town than you might expect. The greater Seattle area has one of the most (if not THE most) active linux/unix/perl user group networks I have ever seen. Additionally, there are many linux-only companies in this area. At dinner out, you are just as likely to overhear a conversation about the newest Outlook non-feature as one about how powerful shell scripting is in Linux. Keep in mind, also, that not all MS employees are total soulless whoring drones. I have met some of the smartest people here, and it usually boils down to a wink and a smile if you ask why they work for such an evil company.

Re:Perhaps you're missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't be suprised if you find out that MS employees are contributing high quality code to your favorite open source development project.

Re:Perhaps you're missing the point

[raodin]

I also see far more Apple stickers in car windows that you would expect in the Seattle area.

After living around here most of my life, I've come to the conclusion that there is just a high concentration of geeks in general. I also have to say I've never met any "MS souless whoring drones," those seem to be almost entirely limited to crappy websites - and this is one place where you'd almost expect to meet a few :)

An old quote...

[jdhutchins]

The best say "We're #1", the second best say "We're better than they are" Which one is MS doing?

Re:An old quote...

[Anonymous Coward]

The best say "We're #1", the second best say "We're better than they are" Which one is MS doing?

Since when MS is number 2? I seriously think Apple is way ahead of MS when it comes to technical achievements.

In the article it says:

[ScottGant]

Quip from article: In that way, the research fills a critical gap, he said. Companies "couldn't say, 'Maybe I should just choose Linux because there were 52 Slashdot postings saying that Linux is better,' " he said, referring to a popular Web site for technology news and commentary.

Of course, Slashdot also has as many posts about goatse...which kinda puts it all in perspective. lol

Re:In the article it says:

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

"... because there were 52 Slashdot postings saying that Linux is better,' "
I think that should probably be 52,000 Slashdot postings.

Re:In the article it says:

[EvilTwinSkippy]

What, are you trying to compare the Goatse boy with Linux zealots? I'm pretty sure Goatse boy would be quite offended as being branded a pain in the ass.

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[G4from128k]

First of all, any vendor TCO study is going to be completely bullshit. However, there's a glimmer of truth in the Microsoft stuff:

Whether the report is biased or not, it would behove the Linux community to respond to the report with innovation, not just scorn. For example, improving ease-of-use on admin tools could create a drop in the cost of a Linux support people. Or better File and Print features (Novell/SuSE migth be doing this) could improve TCO in that arena.

My point is that fixing these perceived areas of "Linux inferiority" would make it even harder for Microsoft to create the next version of a biased report. If Open Source is smart, they will exploit these biased marketing reports to set future development priorities and fill any perceived gaps in functionality, ease-of-use, and TCO.

GEEZ!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this newsworthy?
When IBM releases a new version of Domino, is there a posting on macslash?
It is HIGHLY probable that more of Us(tm) have to deal with things like Domino, or Oracle AS, or what-have-you, then some consumer level video editing program.
So what? Apple released, no wait, is GOING TO release a new version of Final Cut.
Did you hear that SUN is going to "ignite" the "Adrenaline Rush" in "Java Technology" based games? Well I hope you didn't hear it on slashdot.
What the fuck? since when are press releases newsworthy? Surely when they relate to the geek population. How many video editors do you know who read macslash? no, really. I know 0
I know 3 IT guys, 2 IT managers, and 4 programmers who read macslash. They don't give a DAMN about some piece of software that they'll never use

Doesn't matter

[cubicledrone]

OS X rules. Should just get a Mac and ignore the argument. Think about it: all the apps, all the CPU speed, 8GB RAM, and a *nix operating system.

Offtopic, Flamebait and Troll, and the little grey duck took all the karma home.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Grievre]

If that's your sig, it's poetically appropriate.

Re:Doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac Zealot Translator-o-matic

Apple have come up with some innovative products, but their market share remains tiny. Sadly, though, many buyers have been mislead by the marketing and eye-candy, and desperately try to justify their overpriced purchases to themselves on forums around the Net. Let's see what they really mean...

"MacOS X is everything Linux wants to be."
"Despite the fact that Linux is just code and can't WANT to be anything, I truly believe that it'd love to be a single-vendor, single-platform, sluggish half-proprietary OS with dwindling market share. Linux would love to throw away its impressively growing corporate takeup for that."

"Apple hardware is for real computer lovers."
"It's no hassle to use a plethora of keyboard combos to make up for the patronising one-button mouse. Despite the fact that my hands have FIVE fingers, and multiple-buttons make Web browsing so much more pleasant, I prefer my computer to be treat me like a special-needs child."

"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
"My non-techie friends drool over the transparency and scaling effects, even though UI research has shown that they add practically nothing to getting real work done. It feels like KDE 2 on a Pentium 200, and I can't change to a light and fast WM, but those drop-shadows must make me work so quickly!"

"OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source."
"OpenDarwin.org and its community of about 27 is surely not just a token gesture by Apple. Pretty much nobody uses pure Darwin, and all the crucial components of the system are closed and require me to spend money just to get major OS updates, but they're really helping the community somehow."

"You get what you pay for with Apple hardware."
"My iBook was made by in Taiwan by AlphaTop and has design and build quality flaws (needing foam sheets jammed in to stop the common problem of the keyboard scratching the screen). Meanwhile thousands of Mac laptop owners are trying to sue Apple over poorly-made logic boards. But it's silvery and cost far more than an x86 laptop of better spec, so it must be much higher quality!"

"...blah blah MHz myth blah..."
"Although there's truth in PPC being more elegant than x86, it's crushing that the top-of-the-range 1.5 GHz chip is slaughtered by the equivalent 3 GHz Pentium 4. However, Steve Jobs showed some vague Photoshop filter benchmarks at the last MacWorld, so being a leprotard, I'm convinced."

News@11!

[sepluv]

News@11! OMG! Reports suggest that M$-funded studies tend to support M$. [waaa...aaaaah...I sounded l337 then.]

As M$ have such a track record as a company who like to pay people to say that their software is crap (reverse astroturfing[?]), reduce their own profits, tell the truth and make as little money as possible; I find this to be a shocking revelation.

How could even the borg be so evil. This beyond evil. It's a conspiracy -- M$ could not have thought up such a plan themselves -- the CIA, the FBI, MI5, Bush and the Queen (all known for their vast intelligence) must have masterminded such a plot. </sarcasm>

Seriously, Maybe this is a coincidence, but anyway, their site is slow for me ATM and below (quite funny) is what happened when I first tried out their site (when it was first /.ed) -- it has also beens low when not /.ed and other people on different connections have confirmed its slowness.

I'm on a very fast college connection (Gb/s or sthg and direct connection to the European backbone) (with hardly anyone else around as its after closing time). Earlier I downloaded Apache which took a few seconds.

Shortly afterwards I thought I'd check the MS anti-free-software site at http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/facts/ to get my blood pressure up, and to laugh at their reasons why free software is more expensive than proprietary software.

The homepage took more than 2 minutes to load -- I went off to talk to someone and came back and it was still loading! When it loaded I read the first news item on the page and ROFLed.

The news item (at the forementioned URI) says that, and I quote, "Microsoft-sponsered benchmarks [by an] independent review by Meta [a company]" show that "WinTel web servers perform better than Linux".

Need I say anymore...

Dumb story

[Anonymous Coward]

So researchers should work for free to be considered independent?

Beating a dead horse... excessively

[graveyardduckx]

I don't think the word "news" applies to this article, but I guess "olds" just doesn't sound right either... how about "same shit, different day"?

Selective Reporting

[fuzzybunny]

What I find hilarious in that marketing "report" is the focus on "TCO" (which isn't so total). They don't address a whole bunch of factors which come back to bite you as a MS-only shop:

-resultant (direct and indirect) security costs
-inflexibility
-hardware costs
-...

So essentially yeah, I can say the TCO (including acquisition) of a network of P90s running a DOS-based text interface is really low, but what does that say about my business' capability? *silence from the ranks*

I'm no Linux fanatic--I believe in somewhat heterogenous environments, and that every app/product has its place. Also, Microsoft here have been doing a fantastic job responding to our needs and requirements with information and updates about security issues, even though I'm sure it's a direct result of pressure and arm-twisting (shows what a bit of competition can do to a lazy organization).

However, this sort of goes to prove that adage about "lies, damn lies and statistics". What a lot of IT shops who've focused entirely on the bottom line start realizing is that you don't get around hiring very good, expensive IT staff if you want to keep your business running. Fact of life and all that.

But then again, I don't expect the types of people who want "facts of life" distilled down to "numbers on a Powerpoint presentation" to necessarily be directly interested in long-term benefit to their companies.

I've made a difference

[WebMasterJoe]

'Maybe I should just choose Linux because there were 52 Slashdot postings saying that Linux is better,' he said

Well, he must have at least looked at the slashdot article, because a headline I made fun of last time has been removed! Previously, the headline read "10 Times Less Expensive Than Linux," and now it's "Far Less Expensive." It's stilll wrong, but at least it's not quite so absurd.

But since my voice was heard the first time, I have another suggestion. Stop trying to look like Apple! That page looked like it came straight out of Quartz! Why not try making your documents match your own company's image, instead of a competitor's image?

I don't understand it

[Qbertino]

It don't understand this. M$ can't be _that_ stupid, can they?

Step number one was completly negleting OSS and hoping customers wouldn't notice. *That* was a time when M$ should have prepared to sell it's own Linux distro with DX 9 and some other embrace and extend stuff. They missed it and screwed up. Lucky was we.

Step two was bashing the GPL as 'unamerican' and other bullshit and bringing customers to look twice at licensing where they used to give a hoot about the small print. Thus causing them to also look at M$ licenses and notice what BS they have been subscribing to for years allready. Ballmer backed of merely a half a year later and admited it was a bad plan to draw so much attention to OSS by bashing Linux/GPL in such a way.

Step three: Publish studies were everybody with more than 2 braincells notices in an instant that Linux/OSS is on top of things and M$ knows nothing other to do about it than flail the bullshitting-club left right and center.

Can a company of this size with marketing departments on a budget as big as the anual throughput of something like the third of afrika be so stupid and windows focused to pull such a mindless stunt?
Honestly, if I were a stockholder of M$ I'd be somewhat pissed and would want a question or two answered on that matter. M$ better get a grip and start preparing to change their business model or else they're gonna be in deep shit faster than any of us had ever hoped for.

Re:I don't understand it

[pandrijeczko]

The reason why Microsoft are fighting Linux using FUD through advertising is because they simply do not know how to deal with the situation.

Every previous competitor to Micosoft has been a tangible company that has produced a similar or better product that MS have either assimilated into their own branding or wiped out of existence - the analogy of Microsoft to "The Borg" is a well thought out one, believe me!

However, this time, they can't "buy" Linux because no company owns it and it's attacking them on all sides - on servers, in embedded devices, even the signs of Linux making good inroads onto the desktop are now becoming apparent. (Although a huge number of Linux users have been happily using it on the desktop for years anyway!) Add to that that OpenOffice is free, getting closer and closer to MS Office everyday *and* it runs on Windows, you can see why they are really scared.

However, Microsoft's strategy is stupid because it's based on arrogance rather than common sense. What Microsoft *should* do is retreat slightly, drop the areas of their business that's losing them money (i.e. X-Box, embedded stuff and MSN) & pump the money they get back into R&D and testing their profit-making products better.

Whether you or I use or prefer Linux to Windows is neither here nor there - the fact is that a lot of people *do* like MS Office and Windows but hate the attitude of Microsoft the company. Consequently, Microsoft should be doing its utmost to improve its reputation in the eyes of existing customers - give them more stable, cheaper products and do their best to close down the endless stream of bugs and security holes in their products. Their customers become happier, they feel better about Microsoft and they remain customers.

I do question your comments about DirectX though. Why would the Linux community want DirectX? It's bloated and slower than OpenGL for starters. If DirectX was given to the Linux community as closed source binaries, nobody would use it anyway - and there's *NO* chance of Microsoft Open Sourcing DirectX.

Love Microsoft or hate them, they will bring along their own demise through their arrogance - the fact that they have such an open anti-Linux campaign going just serves to bring Linux to the forefront more; e.g. "Well if Microsoft are worried about Linux, there MUST be something in it."

Oh, and they should also ditch Steve Ballmer - the guy looks like a nightclub bouncer, has the charisma of a road accident and does Microsoft no favours when videos leak out to the Internet of him shouting and screaming at the MS sales force like a moron.

Lie vs hide results

[Simon Lyngshede]

I personally don't think that the research companies make up results, just to please Microsoft. I do however believe that results that doesn't favor Microsofts products remain upublished.

The result for the research companies work is only valuable because people trust them, they can't really afford to lie. On the other hand Microsoft wouldn't allow them to publish which doesn't favor their products. The research is stil useless, because the company who is paying can choose not to make the findings available.

Re:Where is everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the amateur idiots running this site they're likely making untested code changes directly on the production server(s). What, you were expecting solid, stable code? Combine shit blogware with moron admins and you get Slashdot.

Don't worry, be happy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that war has officially been declared, let's get on with it. Finally, Microshlock is starting to waste advertising dollars on bogus studies to try to undermine Linux. Let's think about this: how is the war on mosquitoes doing? or cockroaches or rats? Linux is successful because it's critical mass has long passed the point where it can be eradicated. Don't fight by repudiating MS's store-bought 'facts', fight by spreading the infestation! Do some guerilla marketing. Demonstrate Linux using Knoppix http://knoppix.org (for example) - and leave them with a CD. Install OpenOffice everywhere and anytime you can. Most of all, get to the students and educators. They are the real targets. MS has vast programs to hijack the curriculae of schools, colleges and universities. War can be hell, but let's make it hell for Redmond.

In other news....

[DarkHelmet]

Fox guarding henhouse benefits... Fox!

Internet driver's license would be a boon

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?

A global internet driver's license - comparable to that of a passport - would be an excellent idea!

It would facilitate readily traceable e-mails (good bye spammers), proof of identity when e-trading, access control to sensitive/adult content and so on.

I challenge you to rebuke these benefits - preferably in an intelligent way and not just dismissing everything as "commie-talk".

Re:Internet driver's license would be a boon

[Jim_Maryland]

There are a lot of reasons that this wouldn't work, but the first that comes to my mind is this...


I have a monitoring application that checks the status of all the systems on my network. The application detects a failure of a server and sends an automated email to: my work email; my pager, my home email. Who sends the email? While the obvious answer would be to store my ID with the monitoring application, a normal person would probably be very protective of that ID and not allow it to be stored (and possibly stolen).

Another use, what about forums such as this where an automatic message is sent out when a user responds to your post (in your case, you hide behind anonymous coward, but a typical user wouldn't)? Who's ID would be used to comply with traceable ID's?

Would the next step be to impliment corporate ID's then? If so, what would stop any company, including spammers, from abusing their ID?

Jim

$subject is $adjective for $object

[jki]

as in: "Our response to WTO has been to spend 300 million yuan on a research and development centre and improve the quality of our brands. In March last year, a research centre in Kentucky found that our tobacco, grown using only natural fertiliser, causes the least harm to consumers. Actually, it is good for health - it calms the mood and stops old people from becoming muddled and getting Alzheimer's disease." -- Hill of the Red Pagoda Group, China's biggest cigarette producer. O'Neill, M. Beijing briefing: tobacco giant in training for WTO, "South China Morning Post" 2000 August 28.

There is approximately 42^42 reports published yearly on any given subject. If you cannot find your truth in one of them you just don't know what you want your truth to be like.

template

[pergamon]

$ORGANIZATION_A funded study shows $ORGANIZATION_A's product far superior to $ORGANIZATION_B's product. News at $TIME.

Big $EXPLETIVEing deal.

I am happily surprised that it made the front page of a Seattle paper, though.

Re:template

[FooAtWFU]

Darn. I used to like the Seattle-PI. They run two of my favorite comic strips online. And these are King's Features comics, too, so if they didn't there would be nowhere else I could get them in real time, or even look at their three-year-plus archive.

Re:template

[juan2074]

I used to (before 1995) subscribe to the Times just for the crossword puzzle. But when they jacked up the rates, forget that. . .

But now I enjoy reading Bill Virgin's column at the P-I. (Maybe he and Cringely are half-brothers.)

Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit Microsoft

[Qbertino]

In related News:
Sky is blue.

Classic

[Infernon]

I guess I should be ashamed of myself for always being so surprised when Microsoft continually refuses to defeat something via innovation or hard work and instead chooses the propaganda route.
Their strategy, in this particular case, will probably lure a couple of CIO's who stumbled upon the 'independent study' into Microsoft's camp, but then again, anyone not willing to do a fair amount of research on their own probably deserves Microsoft software.
We're in the process of phasing out our Microsoft servers. Currently, we've replaced ISA with Censornet (totally kicks ass) and we're going to be moving our DNS and DHCP servers over as well. We do have a couple of applications that depend on Windows, so I don't suppose that we'll be dumping those boxes any time soon, but the point I was trying to make before I sidetracked myself is that replacing ISA with a free solution that does not require a weekly reboot and would probably run forever if we locked it in a closet is something that my boss really likes. TCO of our Censornet/Linux box? What they're paying me. TCO of ISA server? After licenses, you've got your downtime due to reboots, etc. It was also on a pretty beefy box as well (before this gets flamed).
Oh, right... I'm new to Linux, but I can read and teach myself. It took me three hours to replace our ISA server and I've spent about two administering its replacement over the past two months. It's not hard to pick up at all, but I suppose that all runs back to the propaganda machine...

Re:Classic

[HangingChad]

anyone not willing to do a fair amount of research on their own probably deserves Microsoft software.

ROFL! Can I borrow that line? Good one. There really is only one study that matters: The one you do in your own enterprise/office/home. Run some pilot programs. Experiment. Though I keep forgetting that most Windows admins are so busy just keeping things running they don't have time to do resource planning.

True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywhere

[steve_l]

Looking at the
.NET vs J2EE/Linux study


The reviewer compares the cost of WebLogic+Oracle versus Windows Server+ SQL server. While the OS is much cheaper (and they omit costs of securing the platform against repeated worms), it is the cost of the proprietary software that gives MS its 25% cost saving.

The thing is, the cost of the app server and database are huge; they dwarf everything. So a large size company would only pay $5K for Redhat versus $40K for windows, but then pay $160K for WebLogic and $40K for oracle (versus $0 and $20K for the MS solution). And of course the annual maintenance fees are simply a fraction of the software costs, so they are more on the j2ee system.

Really the survey says 'J2EE using Oracle and WebLogic is more expensive than .NET and SQL server'. And it probably is true. But that is what comes of not embracing open source more fully. Adopt JBoss instead of WebLogic, save nearly $160K. Adopt Postgres or MySQL instead of Oracle, save $40K. end result: open source wins hands down, provided development costs are roughly comparable.

So yes, the study was utterly rigged. It makes a valid critique of using WebLogic and Oracle, but says nothing about Linux/JBoss/mysql.

Without getting into a religious argument

[Omega1045]

If MS really want to have a study like this and show no bias on the part of the researchers, they should have done it anonymously. I imagine they could have set up a corporation in any number of states that do not require you to disclose who owns the corporation.

They fund the corp, and the corp funds the study group. No funds are known to be coming from MS. Hire a couple of industry luminaries or professor types that are perceived to have independent feelings towards the whole MS vs. Linux stuff. Have them run the short-lived corporation only to get the study done. They would be the only ones to know the money is coming from MS.

Now that I think about it, this also sounds like a sneaky way to provide a study that you could still try to bias, even though in appearance it would look unbiased.

The thing that bugs me about those studies

[walterbyrd]

is that msft usually tries to hide the funding. For example, a ziff-davis article comes out with a headline like: "Independent study shows linux has higher TCO than Windows." and you have to really dig to find the "independent" study was actually funded by msft.

If msft came and admitted right away that msft funded the study, I would have no problem with those bogus studies at all.

Balance

[Anonymous Coward]

Balance is everything. Free markets where the governments still have the power to hammer down those who break the rules is the best solution.

Just witness the success of the biggest economy in the world - European Union.

Remembers me of...

[Sunda666]

First they ignore you,
Then, they laugh at you,
Then, they fight you,
And then you win...

And they are already fighting...

cheers.

Re:Remembers me of...

[DickBreath]

Someone over on Groklaw, a couple weeks ago, pointed out how in the backwards world of SCO it works like this...

First they fight you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they ignore you.
Then you lose.

Ask the right question

[nuggz]

Sheesh, it doesn't take a huge conspiricy.

Ask a careful question so that it leads directly to the answer you want.
Set the conditions and assumptions to levels you know will give the desired outcome.
Don't tell anyone about all the situations where you don't get the answer you want.

Ever see a MS study on a Beowolf/Google type deployment? It isn't hard to understand why.

Not another national ID

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. A national computer ID system won't do.

It should be an international computer ID from the start. Preferably run by the UN.

one lone voice.,.

[way2trivial]

well, I have netscape, mozilla, on my pc's at home-just for testing my webpages

I USE IE because I need activeX

it's the only way I can check my son during the day
http://www.veo.com/Observer/kb.aspbr rocks for parenting.. and grandparenting

Re:one lone voice.,.

[Dr. Smeegee]

Weeping.... Weeping....

i have a question

[Ravenrage]

why doesn't microsoft take all this money that they spend on crappy ass studies that no one even gives the time of day and just make a better os??

I Wish They Would Learn Some Math

[Jameth]

They state that:
"Staffing expenses were 33.5% better."

According to that study, they have a chart rating Linux staffing at ~80,000 and Windows staffing at ~58,000.

Now, better refers to an improvement. Therefore, they are refering to the improvement of Windows from Linux. This is ~27.5%.

To say that the report says staffing expenses on Linux are 33.5% worse might be accurate, but the reverse is not right.

I know it's a bit pedantic, but it bugs me. I don't know if they did that more than once, because I only check the first line on the page. I'd bet others are too.

Fact of unreliability

[pajs]

msxml3.dll

error '80072f76'

The requested header was not found /library/toolbar/3.0/js.asp, line 36

This is using konqueror.

I think this is the only "fact" i needed to know.:)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

TCO or Total Ownership?

[Junior J. Junior III]

How can they do a Total Cost of Ownership study when you can never truly own a Microsoft OS machine?

You never really OWN a Microsoft OS machine -- you may own the hardware, sure, but you merely license the use of the OS.

A Linux system, by contrast, allows you to actually own and modify the system, with the only restriction being that if you distribute modified GPL'd code, that you make the source available.

Isn't that inherently better than licensning the use-but-not-own?

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[deadmonk]

My point is that fixing these perceived areas of "Linux inferiority" would make it even harder for Microsoft to create the next version of a biased report. If Open Source is smart, they will exploit these biased marketing reports to set future development priorities and fill any perceived gaps in functionality, ease-of-use, and TCO.

Whoah there, be careful. One of the things that you don't want to have happen is to let your competitor play the fiddle that you're dancing to. That's letting them control your actions, and possibly let them divert you to something useless.

The real trick here is to make sure that Linux-related development aimed at making it more competitive addresses real concerns, not just the ones that Microsoft's marketing department decides to trot out as the latest useless thing to pick a fight about.

Remember this is the Seattle PI

[Analogy Man]

What caught my eye was that this was on the front page and not buried in the business section.

Why is this a big surprise considering the source? Microsoft is a big time player in the region (maybe bigger than Boeing). News regarding MS in Seattle is like a major initiative by GM/Ford/Crysler in Detroit media.

look they even admit it!!!

[in4mation]

"Analyzing real-world custom application-development projects pinpoints areas where Microsoft tools save money : lower product costs, lower labor costs due to simplified development processes, and lower maintenance costs."

This is off the get the facts website. So they are basically saying that they are more cost effective in some, but not all areas.

What about the other areas? Where did they go? If you find them please tell me ;-)

Linux response? A political model.

[paiute]

Methods that have been developed in the political arena to counter organizations which have much more money for traditional advertising might be of use here - with a little organization. Candidates have fax teams, who relentlessly fact-check and respond to opposition disinformation with an immediate blizzard of faxes to news organizations full of counterarguments and facts. Recently, the Dean campaign used the Internet pretty effectively as a fairly low-cost tool to organize. So why can't Linux have a website that exists only to counter with some of the detailed analyses I see on Slashdot of MS bullshit ? Why isn't there a rapid response team to send out faxes and emails to journalists all over the world with a quick rebuttal to FUD and links to a site where they would be archived in greater detail? Political candidates find that journalists like to have things parboiled for them (like Rachel Ray having her lettuce already washed). Writers are on deadline. They don't have time to scroll through Slashdot and don't usually have a deep background in computing. You can bet that MS had a PR department that peels the carrots for the press. Why can't Linux do the same? A little time and money can be leveraged into a great deal of visibility by these methods.

Customers pay

[Per Abrahamsen]

There are lots of such studies, financed by the customers. That is, corporations or government agencies who want to know which solution is most cost-efficient. These customers have no interest in anything but the most accurate result.

The problem is that such customers often have no interest in publishing the results, in particular when in may benefit their competition as well. Sometimes government funded studies are published, or studies done by large trade unions. And the companies who perform the studies have an interest in publishing part of them, enough to attract customers to other studies.

Re:Customers pay

[budgenator]

These customers have no interest in anything but the most accurate result.
There are so many factors involved with the TCO of any software/Business system that accurate measure is impossible.
If the Local Comm College is cranking out MCSE's a dime a dozen, the admin cost's will be less than where MCSE's are in demand.
How many times does a Bussiness change it's partices to fit the predjudices of a commercial software package, and incur training expenses rather than use a custom package that does exactly what you want?
If the latest virus whipes out net traffic, and my ATM card gets whiped out because the PIN number gets currupted three times, does company B's accounts get charge with the cost of replacing bank A's ATM card for me?

Nice Ad

[dcocos]

look at the ad surrounding the article :-)

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I would like to point out that Unix way, text files and command lines, while more difficult to learn is far superior in repeatability.

I've been a network engineer for 5 years, and a hard-core computer junkie since I was 7. Every time Microsoft comes up with a new GUI I have to play hide-and-go-seek to find the one dialog box that contains the checkmark I want to pick. That infuriates me, and makes trying to document procedures all but impossible. In unix I simply tell them to go into this file end edit this line. Even better, I can usually write a script to do it for them.

Microsoft would do us all a favor if on the next version of their OS they go back to good old fashioned INI files. Having to break out a registry editor tool every time I discover they forgot to write in a hook for a setting I need is ifuriating.

Biased AND True

[catherder_finleyd]

It's true that Microsoft could be biased. At the same time, they could be right. As a Web Developer, I've worked with both ASP.Net and J2EE/Servlets/JSP. Microsoft's claim that the .Net Development platform is more efficient is on the mark. Sun knows that, and it is a BIG reason they are trying to bring out a better Java IDE!

Re:Biased AND True

[nberardi]

Yeah I totally agree it is the same reason they have started advancing the language so quickly recently. Generics, Boxing, foreach, etc.

Unless you lose

[bwoodring]

Novell,
Corel,
Lotus,
Borland,
Netscape,
Appl e

All these companies got Microsoft to fight them, and it didn't work out so well.

Re:Unless you lose

[DickBreath]

All these companies got Microsoft to fight them, and it didn't work out so well.

It is clear to everyone that fighting Microsoft on a commercial front will fail. If you try to go into the OS business, or Office Suite business, the venture capitalists will laugh.

This is what is unique about Open Source. It is the only real competition that can put up a plausible fight.

I find it ironic that everyone except Microsoft is now moving towards either Linux or a Unix like OS. Even Microsoft now has Services For Unix, which IMHO may be due to their realization of this -- a way to hedge their bets, not be left holding the only non-standard system which is not where all the excitement is happening.

Re:Unless you lose

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, exactly. They are COMPANIES. Linux is not a company. It is totally free technology.

What's your point? Microsoft can beat Red Hat, and Novell, and Foo Corp, but they can't beat Linux. It's like Coca Cola trying to beat "water".

Re:Unless you lose

[drsmithy]

I find it ironic that everyone except Microsoft is now moving towards either Linux or a Unix like OS.

Who is "everyone else" ? Only company I can think of is Apple, and the difference there is they had already tried and failed to do their own "next gen" OS project. Microsoft, OTOH, had (and still have) NT and thus have no need to move to a "Linux or Unix like OS".

Re:Unless you lose

[abertoll]

Unless of course you consider the fact that even with everyone against them, Microsoft still IS the majority.

Re:Unless you lose

[Moofie]

Yeah, companies like IBM sure don't count.

Wha huh?

Re:Unless you lose

[drsmithy]

Yeah, companies like IBM sure don't count.

"Moving towards". IBM have a had a unix based platform for some time, they're hardly "moving towards" one.

TCO is a bad argument

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Apple argued TCO arguments for years and years. But it didn't do them a damn bit of good. It may have even been true, especially before Windows 2000 came out. However: 1) nobody believed Apple, or the "TCO" voodoo, because it smelled like an accounting game, and 2) Microsoft was cheaper for initial purchase. Who cares about support later? That's another department's problem. The initial outlay is the killer, whereas continuing cots are easier to manage.

I think Microsoft knows this, and that's why they're freaked out. I see exactly the same tools that Microsoft used against Apple, being turned around to be used by Linux against Microsoft. When Linux becomes "good enough", the sticker price is going to be what matters most.

Re:TCO is a bad argument

[Anonymous Coward]

TCO is a bad argument particularly for Microsoft based on my own humble personal experience.

$500 for Office? $1,000 for Project? $300 for the operating system? Are they NUTS? No, really. I think I am since I am the one that Ok'd the purchases of some of their products.

To boot I've never been too impressed with their software. Buggy, crashy. Not the "experience" I was looking for after working on college Unix systems and their mainframes.

The solution, stop-gap, was to at least be picky about the hardware. Stem-to-stern custom built systems of my choosing through the local mom&pop reseller.

Years pass and suddenly I realize that the hardware I'm picking is the same as the guts of a Mac short of the motherboard & processor. OS X comes along and of course another Mac-head is born. The secretaries and engineers absolutely love working on them ... because they, well, just work. For the first time I can give my mother a computer and not worry about trying to fix it when it crashes or is infected with another virus. And at the same time recommend it to my brother and not worry he'll come back complaining that it can't do this or that and maybe another thing ... all at the same time.

$129 for OS X. Yeah, they may charge you for the beta. And then charge you again. But it's STILL less than any single version of Windows has ever been. Sure Linux is even cheaper and I wouldn't run my core services on anything else (yet :), but MICROSOFT having the lowest TCO over Linux? They can't even touch OS X for goodness sake!

Analysts.

[13Echo]

This just in...

Microsoft funds analysis of Windows/Linux TCO. Buys analysts with free MCSE training and an XBox. More news at 11!

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[man_of_mr_e]

Adopt JBoss instead of WebLogic, save nearly $160K. Adopt Postgres or MySQL instead of Oracle, save $40K. end result: open source wins hands down, provided development costs are roughly comparable.

You've got to be kidding me. Postgre, while a capable midrange database is nowhere near the performance or capability of Oracle, and MySQL isn't even in the same universe given that it lacks such basic features as stored procedures and transactions. This isn't even counting all the "value add" that oracle provides with their support tools and programming environments.

If your needs can be met by MySQL or Postgre, sure... don't buy Oracle, but then you'd be stupid to buy Oracle even if those open source tools weren't available. You'd probably use Access on Windows instead.

As for JBoss vs. Weblogic, i don't have enough experience with either to make a valid comparison, but Weblogic is ceratinly a much more capable product by features alone.

The REASON he answered that way is twofold

[tmoertel]

First, Leach is a skilled manipulator of words. He is capable of making a precise statement that projects the Microsoft viewpoint, regardless of the reality. That he is convincing and appears that he is a true believer is a side effect.

Second, he is artfully avoiding the reporter's question: "Would Microsoft have publicized the results if they hadn't been positive?" Of course, the answer is, No. But giving that answer would have drawn the interviewer's attention (and likely the reader's) to the possibility that Microsoft is paying for many studies, most of which document Linux's superiority in important respects, but then publishing only the minority that support Microsoft's claims. Instead, he sidesteps the question, telling the white lie that they hadn't even considered the possibility of having Linux come out on top and thus having to silence those findings: "[That Windows would come out on top] was never going to be a question."

He sidesteps the question and reinforces the "reality" that Microsoft wants to project in one clever response.

Give him his props: This man has skills.

Re:The REASON he answered that way is twofold

[DreamerFi]

He sidesteps the question and reinforces the "reality" that Microsoft wants to project in one clever response.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but the way I interpreted "[That Windows would come out on top] was never going to be a question." was "we paid for the damn thing so of course we came out on top" with a side-order of "what a stupid journalist you are when you have to ask that, it's common sense!"

-John

Re:The REASON he answered that way is twofold

[DunbarTheInept]

Second, he is artfully avoiding the reporter's question:.

Not necessarily. If he is actually brain damaged enough to believe what he said with all honesty, namely that a negative result from the survey would be impossible, then it is a perfectly valid response to the question to point out that it assumes facts not in evidence. It's like answering the question "have you stopped beating your wife", when you haven't even started. Technically, the answer is 'no', but you know that will be interpreted badly, so you attack the question itself. It is not necessarily dodging to point out that a question is unfair and thus you refuse to answer it.

Now, I don't for a minute believe he actually does think there was no chance of the results being negative, as he claimed. It was in *that* part that he was being dodgy and, to put it bluntly, lying, and that's where the deception lay, everything after that (including the 'dodge' of the question by pointing out it assumes facts not in evidence) was consequential to that first lie.

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time Microsoft comes up with a new GUI I have to play hide-and-go-seek to find the one dialog box that contains the checkmark I want to pick. That infuriates me, and makes trying to document procedures all but impossible. In unix I simply tell them to go into this file end edit this line.

If you're all using the same version of your OS, yeah. But let's be realistic - no two Unices put their configuration files in exactly the same place with exactly the same name, even if they're using exactly the same software, which they probably aren't.

The advantage of the textfile approach is not standardisation - it's that if you know what you're looking for you can grep for it quickly and you'll know it when you see it.

Microsoft's "Methodology"

[AstroTech]

One thing that I noticed in the article that was glossed over was the statement that these "independent" evaluations were done using Microsoft's guidelines for comparison. So... if I commission a study and tell you that in doing the cost/benefit comparison a nice box is more important than low cost...

TCO and Corporate Culture

[hey!]

Two points:

(1) Private studies are by definition non-scientific, even if they use methods that are borrowed from science, because science by definition is a public process. It isn't just the thumb on the scales that should make you wary of these kinds of studies. It's the fact the the methodology, hypotheses, and methods used to reach conclusions have not been peer reviewed. In other words its just an opinion.

(2) TCO is not something that can be talked about as if it is a single property that applies to every organization. Proprietary software can't be evaluated against free without taking into account corporate culture. Or for that matter you can't ingore the terms of the partiuclar proprietary license when you are determining its impact.

Free software favors organizations with a more agile culture, because its non-restrictive nature empowers individual and small group initiative. In cultures were people can self-orgnanize to solve problems, restrictive licenses create friction because change agents have to consider licensing implications and possibly initiate procurement procedures.

Restrictive licenses do not ever help users, but their impact is less on hierarchically managed organizations, where initiatives, plans and ideas flow down from the top and only results of plans flow upward. In this model, the higher ups decide what is to be accomplished, tell the workers how to do it, and provide the materials necessary. Here, since most decisions are made in advance, the licensing restrictions can be factored in and the necessary rights aquired before any work takes place.

These are kind of extremes on a continuum that all organizations fall on; few organizations give their memebers complete autonomy, and few completely forbid individual initiative. Probably every kind of business focus has its own ideal organizational point that falls between these two extremes. The hierarchical end of the scale is efficient for highly routine, repetitive tasks that are improved by successive refinement and do not require agile response to rapidly changing market needs or competition. Flat organizations with a high degree of individual empowerment excel at responding rapidly to unpredictable and even chaotic situations. Probably it's best not to make too much of a value judgement about organizational cultures; its different horses for different courses. Of course a flat organization with a high degree of individual empowerment sounds a lot more fun to work for, but the reality is that successful organizations tend to blend both aspects: they are both flexible and have coherency. Different parts of an organization may even have different cultural needs and this effects licensing impacts.

In any case, getting back to TCO, an orgnization that tends toward hierachy and relatively rigid planning and execution can tolerate restrictive licensing, and may even choose to outsource a lot of IT expertise. A kind of schooling (as in fish) mentality makes sense; if technology not a success factor, you shouldn't focus on it. An organization that is tracking a great deal of fast moving competition and has to be able to respond rapidly with IT has to either work with non-restrictive licenses, or to be willing to puchase the flexibility. In that case, the organization must weigh any special technical merits the closed software has, any special support merits the vendor has, against the dollar outlay it takes to buy the flexibility it needs.

So, places where free software is a no-brainer are (A) in operations that require maximum agility on razor thin margins, OR(B) where the free software is approximately on par with the proprietary.

Places where proprietary software is a no-brainer is where (A) flexibility in IT doesn't matter much or is even is a distraction, AND (B) support and product features for the proprietary solution are clearly superior to any free ones.

Every other case has to be judged individually.

By the way, smart companies in

Give Me A Break

[Jim_Hawkins]

Please. This article should have never made it to this page. The only purpose it serves here is for another round of Slashdot bashing against Microsoft.

Of COURSE Microsoft is going to only sponsor studies that are in favor of them. The same way Linux would sponsor studies that said they were the best. It's the way life (business?) works.

This incessant Microsoft bashing is really becoming lame. I know I'm generally a proponent for Microsoft, but this isn't even the case here. Complaining about something just for the sake of complaining about something...it just sucks.

Default

[Iscariot_]

"but because they are not even aware of the existence of Opera or Mozilla"

Hmmmm... I guess. But I'm betting the real reason that most people use IE is because it comes installed! Most people are very happy with IE. Hell, my dad is still amazed at the anoying "media-bar" that IE added a while back. As long as Netscape and Opera lack that, and I mean have a media-bar that points to micrsofts easy-to-use site, then I don't see him switching.

We slashdotters have to realize that while we find the browser from MS just a little above tollerable, many people prefer it, or are just too novice to even desire changing.

Re:Default

[Killswitch1968]

"But I'm betting the real reason that most people use IE is because it comes installed!"...
... too novice to even desire changing.

I'm sure this has helped IE gain a lot of market share, but it is nevertheless an excuse. People will stop using IE and will switch as soon as a better alternative is made aware to them. It is up to MS's competitors to advertise and explicit transmit their comparative advantage to their customers.

Re:Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit Microsof

[Anonymous Coward]

In related News:
Sky is blue.

Looks pretty grey from where I'm sitting. Damn, sometimes I hate being British.

Commissioned Study equals slanted parameters

[GAVollink]

Say I'm from a company that makes solar powered cars. If I wanted to prove my cars are just as fast as the other cars on the market, I would commission a study about how fast my car goes down-hill, with supplimental study funds for flat surfaces. - Go ahead write the report - ...

What? You want funds for an uphill test, er, I really can't afford that. Just write the report without the uphill tests.

Re:Calm down cowboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is it a privilege? That implies prior permission is required. If a company sells internet access and I sign up and pay for it, what right to you have as an external entity to tell me I can or can't access the internet I'm paying for? I am not violating anyone's rights, I am simply engaging in the free market. Then again, what does Europe (read: socialists) know about the free market?

Obvious truth

[marmol]

Hello!
Linux is one of the best things that could have happened to M$
Having thousands of gifted brains in products with available source code. New algorithms, new ideas, new products that will come out from M$, no R&D involved....

Here's an EASY way.

[khasim]

#1. State your scenario. (example: corporate website serving static and dynamic content from database).

#2. Determine what platforms you want to compare.

#3. Get teams for each platform.

#4. Give each team the same amount of money and time and let them solve the problem however they see fit. This will allow each platform to demonstrate its strengths.

#5. Have the other teams evaluate the problems in each solution.

Biased terms may lead to biased results

[hweimer]

While it is good to see that the issue gets some attention in the media, the article fails to address the central point:

If a company pays for a study, it may set the terms under which the study is carried out. If these terms are biased, even if the study is carried out as independently as possible, the outcome may be wrong.

The mentioned studies don't only compare Linux and Windows. They compare Oracle and MS SQL Server, Mainframes and x86 servers, etc. A scientific approach would be to use the same applications on the same hardware with different operating systems.

Mod parent up!

[khasim]

Because something is easy to do with a GUI does NOT mean that it makes maintenance or support easier.

Text files are easy to copy from machine to machine.

They take more time to learn, but on you learn them, your support time and expense DROPS. With Windows, it is un-install, re-boot, re-install, re-boot again?, did that fix it?

With Linux it is, compare the files and copy over the text file.

And it is easy to do that remotely.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Foolhardy]

You can export .reg files, copy those and import them in an automated way. There is also a remote registry service.

Lies

[BBird]

This is the usual, lies, damn lies, and TCO analysis...

Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

One of the things that people miss about this story is that up here in Microsoft Country, it is sacrilege to question Microsoft. When I saw this story in my morning paper, I was very surprised, as the local reporters rarely bite the hand that greases the local palms in many ways. When it comes to Microsoft (and Boeing), the Seattle PI and Times are not normally independent thinkers.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to be kidding me. Postgre, while a capable midrange database is nowhere near the performance or capability of Oracle, and MySQL isn't even in the same universe given that it lacks such basic features as stored procedures and transactions.

Well, PostgreSQL beats MSSQL, though...

Independent Researchers

[unborn]

If they don't write favorably of Microsoft then they won't be included as a sample. Thus the researcher will not be able to include that research in its public portfolio. Hence the possibility of skewed results in the name popularity contest of research organizations/companies.

not so far from the truth

[tetabiate]

Two, three years ago the argument to migrate
to Linux was mainly price, additionaly it
offered stability and simplicity. But these
days companies are selling per-processor
Linux distributions with expensive consulting
services. Only a few customers (if any) base
their decisions on technological advantages
offered by Linux, price continues to be the
reason but it is no longer as significant as it
was in the past.

IBM's new PR war

[amightywind]

I've definitely noticed in the last few mnths that Microsoft seems to be REALLY ramping up its PR war against Linux. They've been talking about it for a while, and now we're seeing it.

IBM has been running the Linux child TV commercials for many weeks now. I think they are very effective. The future is free!

Re:IBM's new PR war

[TheLinuxSRC]

"The future is free!"

I believe that is "The future is open" ;)

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[ageitgey]

I'm going to write a program that searches slashdot for the phrases "mysql" and "transactions" and always posts a short reply that MySQL does support transactions now. And stored procedures will be in the next version.

MySQL has a LONG way to go to be comparable to Oracle obviously, but I just wish everyone would stop repeating this same stuff about features it has had for a while now.

Also, why does everyone ignore Firebird (the database)? It supports all those features and is Free.

Comments not so slow

[GAVollink]

... I have been bitten by the same assumption, which is why I have gotten in the habit of hitting refresh just prior to posting (just to make sure someone hasn't already written exactly what I want to say). Of course, that doesn't meant that someone isn't replying while I do the same. Regardless - you'll notice that as people come into work, and check their home page (your home page too?) - then they see the article and check in. The bulk of slashdoters are from the US - and are doing the same as me.

What's Odd

[illuminatedwax]

What's odd is that you don't see this kind of negative Linux stuff as often as you would expect from Microsoft. I know that if I were Microsoft and had billions of dollars at my disposal, I'd be sowing a hell of a lot more FUD as well as anti-Linux marketing right now. "You gotta nip it in the bud," as the saying goes, and I'm surprised that, counting all technical publications, Linux has gotten just about as much good press as bad.

Is there any reason that I'm not seeing Windows commercials on TV that are the opposite of IBMs? Like, why haven't I seen a commercial where a bunch of executives are confused and losing productivity because "Linux sucks" and it's "not compatible with everyone else?" You'd think an 800lbs gorilla would throw its weight around a little more.

Perhaps Linux really does have the edge on Windows. Or maybe Windows is taking the view of "if we ignore it, consumers will think it has gone away" or something. But I must know!

--Stephen

Is this all the reports?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to know how many reports MS commissioned? I'm sure if you fund enough studies, you'll find one that will support your point of view.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[dubious9]

MySQL is making strides towards all of the 'enterprise' features of db's like Oracle. (side note: why do people say enterprise when they mean 'scales well'). Stored procedures and the like will be available in MySQL probably in a year.

In my experience, JBoss fares really well against Weblogic, and offers similar support levels. Use Eclipse as your dev. platform, as its features and plugins (as well as ease of plugin development) surpass commericial offerings.

So thus far the only thing we are paying for is Oracle, and it's not that expensive, especially for the quality support that you get. So for a small to medium sized company, get a couple of quality admins, forgo 'enterprise' workstations in favor of a decent Fedora setup. Of couple of good admins should be handle this, without the need for external support. Get enterprise support for the servers and network infrastructure.

Thus with F/OSS you are saving (per workstation) probably in the nieghborhood of $1000. Multiply by 100 workstations, and you can buy yourself another admin.

The problem with comparing a certain offering against Linux/BSD/and OSS, is that with the latter there are so many different possible solutions (which I admit can be a problem) that you can probably find one that will save you significant money, solve your problem, and do it well.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[budgenator]

I caught that too, even in Michigan, we have a few "sacred cow" employers, that realy have to kiss the pooch to get any critical press coverage. In fact by applying the "sacred cow" filter to the article, in comes out extremely deragatory.

Something to be said for subtlety...

[Junta]

If they are too obvious and blatent, clearly demonstrating a huge amount of resource to discredit a competitor backfires. If it is worth that much resource and *requires* that much resource to make a competitor look bad, MS would be more obviously fearful of linux and if it takes a lot of money to offset the good press adequately, that also makes a statement about the quality of linux vs. MS.

Kinda like if someone makes a huge deal of how they don't worry about something, and they repeatedly evoke that fact without solicitation, you know they are lying.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[Anonymous Coward]

> This isn't even counting all the "value add" that oracle provides with their support tools and programming environments.

Like SQL*Plus? Being able to repeat previously-typed commands is over-rated anyway, I say. If only they would have spent 10 more minutes developing the console...

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[poot_rootbeer]

Microsoft would do us all a favor if on the next version of their OS they go back to good old fashioned INI files.

Should we abandon relational databases and go back to CSV files while we're at it?

my own study.

[dremspider]

In my household their are 6 machines. A server, which is running Samba and Apache, running SuSE 9.0 and a desktop running the same thing. Combined cost: 80 bucks. My laptop is running Mepis Linux, and yes I was forced to pay the M$ tax on the laptop my other machines were built. I donated 30 bucks b/c I thought it was a great project. Total: 110 bucks. Now on the windows side: Windows XP home for my parents machine, 200 bucks, this machine was also built. My dads laptop came w/ windows pre installed, so discounting the markup placed on the laptop, it was free. Time to fix the viruses that hit both windows machine twice and yes I had norton antivirus, and yes it was up to date, 6 hours, assuming my time is worth only 20 bucks an hour, 80 bucks. Now windows is up to 280. The cost for anti virus for both machines is 80 bucks, so 340. My dad needed an office suite which came included w/ suse so 400 bucks on top of that. I have proven that Linux is signicantly cheaper than windows in the long run. Windows cost 740 bucks and Linux cost 110 and the cost could have been brought down by not donating. And let us not forget that if I was using windows on my server the cost wold be significantly higher, after I bought all those CALs and everything. So in closing this study was paid for by no one but my self in time.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[poot_rootbeer]

Adopt Postgres or MySQL instead of Oracle, save $40K.

This would only work if those products are functionally equivalent to Oracle. While I am a huge fan of developing with PostgreSQL, there's no way I'd run a massive, mission-critial financial system on it.

Then again, I'd say the same about MS SQL Server.

Whatever. The point is, and we all already know this, is that for a comparison to be valid, ALL variables must be controlled to the greatest extent possible. If Oracle runs on both test platforms, use it on both platforms. If one of the test systems uses a cluster of cheap x86 servers, the other system(s) must do the same.

Why any re$earch lab would agree to do a $tudy where thi$ proce$$ i$ not ob$served i$ $omething that I ju$t can't under$tand.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[johnnyb]

You've obviously never used Postgres. Postgres is in the same league as MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and others. It is not quite as tunable as Oracle, and Oracle can scale higher, but not higher enough to be in a completely different league.

Comparing PG w/ Access shows that you've never used PG. PG supports views, triggers, constraints, the ability to write functions in many languages, indexes, partial indexes, some table inheritance support, includes a genetic query optimizer, can do views of "group by" clauses (and optimizes them very well), can do updateable views, has a really nice "rules" system for rewriting queries, has write-ahead logging, support for multiple transaction isolation levels, and several other features I can't think of here.

The limitations of Postgres are: no support for configurable tablespaces, no automated point-in-time recovery (however, Oracle's PITR is quite limited, too), doesn't work with protocols requiring two-phase commits (PG uses MVCC, which uses less locking), cannot do nested transactions, and does not have a built-in automated replication solution (although third-party products and open-source projects are available).

These limitations are only problematic in the largest of deployments, however, and most of them can be worked around. The only one which would be problematic for most database apps is the lack of support for nested transactions.

"As for JBoss vs. Weblogic, i don't have enough experience with either to make a valid comparison, but Weblogic is ceratinly a much more capable product by features alone."

Actually, JBOSS has led the way in features, with Weblogic playing catch-up. I'm sure there's some things that Weblogic has that JBOSS doesn't, but most people I know who have used both prefer JBOSS.

They saved the best for last ...

[gordguide]

I just love the last paragraph:

" ... Dan Leach, group product manager for the Microsoft Office System, was asked at the time whether Microsoft would have publicized the results if they hadn't been positive. He answered that he had been so confident in the software's benefits that it "was never going to be a question." ..."

It practically proves that only positive studies will be cited; at a minimum it means that only comparisons they are confident of "winning" would form the scope of a study.

Re:They saved the best for last ...

[Little Brother]

Yes, I'm going to spend time and money to publish a study that directly undermines my clients' faith in my product. I realize that this is neither leagaly required, nor generaly accepted buisness practice. However, in order to ? I will sabotage my own company and loose myself at least a job and possibly be sued by shareholders.

Uh-huh, yeah, right, I can see someone with an IQ over 80 doing just that. In Oz.

Come on man, nobody who lives in the real world (this one, not the ideal one we wish we were living in) can fault a company for only publishing the studies that help their cause.

Re:They saved the best for last ...

[gordguide]

Read the whole sentence. It's called "context".

Of course we expect MS to cite positive research.

What is unusual is they admit that they knew what the outcome would be before they paid to have an "independant" person study the very areas they had already assessed.

And since they paid for the research, they get to limit the scope of that research. It's a bit beyond declining to publish the bad news.

You don't hear that kind of admission every day.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[Rick the Red]

Bullshit. The Seattle Times won a Pulitzer for a series critical of the Boeing 737 rudder. Theres little love lost between the papers and Paul Allan, too, even after he bought the Seahawks. Biting the hand that feeds you is a Seattle newspaper tradition going way back. I'll bet they bitched about Denny and Yessler and Doc Maynard back in the day.

It's a fact

[ads.osdn.com.blocked]

Independant studies show: Microsoft is dying.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Bullshit.

Sure, OK, fine. You must be reading a different Seattle PI and Times than I do (every morning, 7 days a week, first page to last, actually...).

Has anyone else noticed ...

[manastungare]

... that the Get The Facts website referenced in the article has been serving broken stylesheets to Opera and other non-MS browsers? Simply setting the User-Agent to MS IE 6.0 gets you a better stylesheet. Poor MS, when will they play fair?

Boeing is leaving, and Mike Rowe is not!

[LifesABeach]

one should consider asking what the city fathers of carthage think of promises made by empires; then apply it to m$.

This just in!

[ProtonMotiveForce]

"Microsoft business, tries to sell products!".

By: Staff Writer, somewhere.

According to recent reports, Microsoft (and even some other corporations) have been reported to be attempting to make money. Their questionable tactics include advertising, self promotion, and paying people to promote or analyze their product.

Wow, whoopdy freakin' do.

Well, of course...

[gillbates]

The real problem is that the studies are geared toward benchmarking the few strengths of the Windows platform. A perceptive reader would note that the IDG study actually confirmed that Windows was significantly less reliable that Linux.

The IDG study mentioned that among file and print servers, Linux servers on Intel platforms averaged a higher workload with a lower failure rate. However, faithful to their master, IDG goes on to contradict itself by noting that Linux admins get paid more than Windows admins. Which means that taken on a per machine basis, Windows is cheaper, but when taken on a workload volume basis, Linux is less expensive.

The problem with such studies is that they are slanted toward the situations in which Microsoft's products do perform reasonably well. Consider for example the Windows-server against Linux-on-mainframe benchmark: a totally useless comparison. In the first place, companies don't buy mainframes for web-serving; they buy them for corporate datacenters. Then, when they want to provide web functionality, they either augment with Windows boxen which must connect to the mainframe for database access, or they run Linux servers on the mainframe. The first case involves hiring additional Windows admins, the second, merely training the existing mainframe systems programmer on Linux. Furthermore, you will never find a situation in which a company's mainframe-based webserver is outperformed by a Windows box. The reason? In real world corporate environments, business critical data is always stored on the mainframe simply because it is the most reliable platform. Thus, the screamingly-fast webserver on a windows box can never run faster than the mainframe simply because it must wait on both the mainframe database and network latency when filling requests.

In reality, the studies are worthless because they simply don't address the manner in which businesses actually use the systems. They ignore the crucial questions of reliability, robustness, compatibility, and support.

Maybe I am missing something

[Eklypz]

..but it seems like this quote is backing up the research as independent.

The funding "never affects the research -- at least at Forrester it doesn't," Mahoney said. "There are some vendors, not the one in question here, but some vendors who say, 'I'd like you to write this thing, and here's what I'd like it to say.' The great majority of research firms at that point will say, 'Thank you very much,' and hang up, or point them toward one of the guys who does that."

I got the overall impression that the article was positive for Microsoft. It seemed to address issues people may have with the study then show them point and couterpoint. I would give this a +1 in favor of Microsoft in the end if you take the article overall.

And then something else (Bill G. IP violation ?)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm kind of sure Bill G. himself is digging quite a lot of open-source-related newsgroups etc. In his most recent anti-spam statement he's about quoting me on some mails i had been sending some months ago.

Would it be possible for me to sue him on Intellectual Property violation ?

Remember Mindcraft?

[Rupert]

They published a benchmark showing Windows outperforming Linux doing a specific task on specific hardware. Everyone here yelled how the benchmark was rigged, that windows had been tweaked by MS developers, but the RedHat install was "out of the box".

So they did the test again, this time with RedHat personnel doing the RedHat setup. Windows still won.

So Linus et al looked at the setup, and changed the kernel. If you did the test today, Linux would win. So MS don't use that benchmark any more.

So really, MS have to do vague and misleading studies, because doing clear accurate ones only benefits Linux!

Please mod him up for this 1 great point

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "The fact is that a lot of people *do* like MS Office and Windows but hate the attitude of Microsoft the company."

That is an insightful point which is rarely expressed.

Look, if you're to any extent a geek, a technology-loving person, then you probably don't really dislike M-soft software. You might like FOSS better, but if there wasn't any FOSS, to some extent you would still be glad there was some closed source software in existence so you could do fun things with your computer. Software is software - it's ALL good. Yes, some is much better than others, but if you're a geek, how can you dislike the software itself?

It seems to me it is the practices which shape the final form of the software, the options which it gives you (or denies you), the nickel and diming of its costs, the phrasing of the licensing agreements, etc. etc. which rub people the wrong way. The fact that M-soft hasn't embraced FOSS says more about M-soft than it says about M-soft's software.

Software is always good. Technology is always good. We all just need to treat software with reverence instead of sacriligiously. It's how it's packaged and treated and presented and the interactions between people creating/handling software which are the important things.

Follow the money

[guacamolefoo]

follow the money

Nothing lets you into the id of an organization or cause like seeing:

1. Where the money comes from, and
2. Where the money goes.

In the Microsoft/GNU/Linux debate, the TCO numbers highlighted on the "Get the Facts" site state that:

" 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."

It neglects to mention that "security" and "AV control" and "worm damage" costs are also commensurately higher.

Follow the money, boys! How much downtime did you have from the last Windows worm?

GF.

What?

[tbone1]

I am shocked, SHOCKED!!! I say, to hear that the person who is funding a study will get the answers they want! Why, you'll be saying that public school teachers will be talking about the importance of public education, next!

Publication bias

[rev063]

Yep. Even if those these studies showed Windows was "better" were valid, how do we know Microsoft didn't commission nine other studies that showed Linux was better for each Windows-positive one?

This problem doesn't just apply to commissioned studies, either. Even in the peer-reviewed academic literature, "publication bias" can be a serious problem. Journals will only publish significant results (or, equivalently, researchers will only submit positive results). For every article which shows drug X is beneficial there could be 10 studies which found there was no effect but were never published, this inflating the apparent benefit of X.

Gawd...

[Anonymous Coward]

You would have to read the linked article to know that... you expect too much.

"independent" methodology

[Spazmania]

Generally speaking, when a company funds an "independent" study of this nature they use several relatively subtle techniques to predetermine the results.

A) They pick the researcher. Every researcher or research group has biases which are hinted at by their previous research. These biases are generally more reflective of the researchers' skill set than of any malfeasance, but they are biases nevertheless, and they bias the results.

B) They choose the research to be performed. For example, if you do a random sampling of the man on the street he'll show a preference for Windows because he's seen it before. Microsoft could then tout that result claiming that "folks like Windows better" even though the research doesn't really justify that claim. By doing some informal in-house studies and then selecting the ones that did well for independent research, the results can be all but guaranteed.

C) They choose which results to show you. The studies which didn't work out well for Windows got round-filed, with perhaps a couple of straw-man studies making it to light so that the paranoid won't go looking for the missing research. While no self-respecting independent researcher would allow the funding agency to prevent publication of the research, its very likely they're prohibited from identifying the funding agency without permission. There are a number of studies out there favoring Linux whose funding sources were not disclosed. How many of them were funded by Microsoft?

Food for thought.

And MS Product Manager admits bogus

[burnin1965]

If you read all the way to the end of the article you will find a nice surprise.

The Microsoft product manager for Office 2003 pretty much admits that these MS funded research reports are biased and bogus.

He answered that he had been so confident in the software's benefits that it "was never going to be a question."

I guess there really isn't even a reason to do research since there is "never going to be a question" on what the outcome will be. We can just let the MS product managers point the way.

burnin

Impossible research since it isn't blind.

[SmallFurryCreature]

Think about it. Whenever on consumer programs they compare say soup they make the test blind. Meaning that the testers don't know wich brand is in wich bowl so they can't have any prejudices. Kassa is a dutch program that does this and it has some amazing results. The cheapest brand from the cheapest store outranking the most expensive. Happened with Chocolate letters, a gift at sinterklaas.

In medical studies they go even further. They use double blind meaning that no-one except an outsider to the test has knowledge of what is what. So a doctor will give medicine to a patient and neither he nor the patient knowns wether is the tested drug or a placebo.

This however is impossible with stuff you can regonize. There is no double blind surgery tests same as their are no blind car tests. Most software can't be tested this way either. At best you could do something like giving one set version A of drivers and the others version B and then see wich they liked best if you stop them from seeing the version number.

But testing an OS like this? Never. Never mind looks. Unix and windows and tron and qnx are just to0 different. Would be like a comparitive review of apples and onions. Yes you can both fry them in a batter but noone will take such a review serious.

Zealots everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

I really do enjoy reading /., but dear god, are the people that post here really this stupid and blind?

Now before people start their redundant and tired quips let me state the following: 1 - I am an employed Network Engineer and have been for the past 10 years (note the still employed part). 2 - I use both *nix and Windows in production environments (OpenBSD, Linux, and Windows). 3 - I use Linux and OpenBSD at home and so do my kids. 4 - I am an MCSE, MCDBA, RHCE and Solaris Admin.

The fact is that all OS's are good, based upon how they are deployed, what they are used for, how they are configured and managed, and how they are secured.

I know MCSE's that could program and manage circles around *nix geeks, *nix "experts" that don't know shit from shinola, and MCSE's that should be shot and forced to wait tables...again, it all depends on the person and their knowledge of the systems.

The reality is that Windows does outperform *nix in certain scenarios, and in others there is no option but to run a *nix flavor. You pick the right vehicle to get you where you need to go and you ensure that the drivers and mechanics you have are properly trained and have experience. Why is it so hard to believe that sometimes MS is the best choice for an application. Forget the licensing, forget the ideology, remember the reality.

The art of using studies like this

[VORNAN-20]

It's really simple. Run ten different studies, all honest, on Linux vs MS software. Let's say that the result (hypothetically of course) is 8 favor MS, 2 favor Linux. Bury the eight unfavorable to MS, advertise the 2 that favor MS. This is just common sense. You need to look at the studies carefully to see whether the cases they cite are typical or not. Actually IMO MS's reputation is not so good these days, people know that they are convicted monopolists that lie, cheat & steal; as a result these claims are regarded as "less than honest" advercapola and disregarded by many. MS can't even fool all of the people part of the time these days, those days are over.

Swapping tactics

[spooky_d]

Perhaps the best thing that Linux vendors can do is actually show the facts. And, very important, not saying that: "Look, we outperform Windows with this and that", but instead saying: "We offer you this set of performances. Microsoft feels the need to compare to us, but we don't." Microsoft is now going under with these articles. No longer "the sure thing", no longer the market dominant... But now there's Linux. They acknowledge it. They use it as a comparison, so they are afraid...

Re:Everybody Loves Ninnle!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...no.

If you're not Dave, you'll never know.

Even if you do run Ninnle Linux.

Uncle Bungle is stung by a couple of bees.

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Microsoft would do us all a favor if on the next version of their OS they go back to good old fashioned INI files.

>Should we abandon relational databases and go back to CSV files while we're at it?

Should I use my telescope to hunt for a new computer, or should I eat an orange when I'm tired?

(Help for the slow: "non sequitur")

Pssst!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

They are COMPANIES. Linux is not a company... It's like Coca Cola trying to beat "water".

Hey, don't look now, but the neocons are selling your precious public resource off to some cartel.

Eerie similarities

[Zork the Almighty]

Microsoft:
"Leading companies and third-party analysts confirm it: Windows has a lower total cost of ownership and outperforms Linux."

From Slashdot troll
"It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying"

You don't have to be an Amazing Kreskin to see this one.

No, its not

[Anonymous Coward]

"The real enterprise stuff is expensive."

No, the list prices are fiction.

Fact is, with Websphere, you can do an enterprise class application for $12K in licensing costs.

The Correct Way To Do The Comparison

[pandrijeczko]

Here's a fair way of doing the comparison...

Have Microsoft and a Linux sponsor (IBM?) each have a competition to pick a team of 6 knowledgeable Windows admins and 6 Linux knoweledgeable admins.

Put two identical empty servers in a room in a neutral place with an independent analysis company.

Give the two teams all the tools they need and, say, 24 hours to build their respective Windows and Linux environments - even allow the Linux team to build their own custom kernel / distro if need be.

Then do the performance testing on the servers.

Result:

1) Fair test results that will probably show Windows is better at some things and Linux at others.

2) Microsoft gets some glory showing a willingness to compete in an "open" trial.

3) Microsoft and Linux both end up with "things to do" to improve their software.

4) We all benefit as a result.

5) We all stop bickering over a marketing campaign that is no different to Mercedes comparing its cars to BMW or Macdonalds comparing its burgers to Burger King.

Again, I'll say it...

[fudgefactor7]

The only way to be sure is to run the damn tests ourselves on identical hardware and see who wins.

All the benchmarks need to be identical code, probably cross-compiled to run on Linux and Windows.

Hell, I'd run the tests myself but I don't know of a cross-platform benchmark that runs on Windows and Linux--both natively. If you know of one (got URL?) let me know and I'll get back to you....

Statistics

[BCW2]

This is voodoo art. Statistics are not a scientific analysis of facts. Any function that takes one data set and can produce two diametricly opposed results is not science. That would produce one answer. Statistics is nothing more than rumor, gossip, and bullshit! Just like the current version of economics, it was created as a separate field in the fifties by some out of work mathamaticians to create jobs for themselves.

There are lies, damn lies, and then, statistics.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[dreadlocks]

I hope that if they are using MS software they:
1) have their fees paid in full
2) have their licenses in order
3) hope MS has a short memory when the PI guys decide to buy new software.

Of course PI could always run a favorable article just as they start software negotiations to give MS some free advertising to show how much they love MS.

Interesting..

[vmfedor]

As many of you are calling the Linux vs. Windows benchmark "just a bunch of FUD," maybe you should download the PDF and take a look at the results and PROVE that Microsoft cheated. I'm no Linux or Microsoft guru but I've configured my fair share of web servers under Windows and it doesn't seem that they're doing anything out of the ordinary. It also appears that they're mirroring every action between the two operating systems whenever possible.

So how about it? It looks to me like Microsoft may have better throughput on these tests. Who can prove them wrong?

Microsoft is News!

[Anonymous Coward]

"What caught my eye was that this was on the front page and not buried in the business section."

This doesn't surprise me at all. A couple days ago I saw Headline News give a news-spot on...the new and upcoming MSN toolbar! So, apparently, Microsoft is newsworthy now.

And my friends wonder why I watch less than three hours of TV a week.

So all "independant" studies aren't

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a coward, just no time to make account.

Not defending MS, but based on this article, there is no longer such a thing as an "independant" study if you commission the study. Why? Because if you pay for it you you get to slant it, by their logic. I do not buy that fully, but if that is the case, I hope the same skepticism is applied when someone other than MS claims their product rocks base on an independant study. MrMako

Security as TCO fudgefactor

[bstadil]

IN addition to what you mention security is a MAJOR TCO component when MS is making a spiel for why people need to upgrade from MS Server 2000 to 2003.

Yet strangely or rather not so strangely missing when comparing to Linux.

One would have thought it is equally important regardless of platforms used, but aparently not.

MS has turned this into an art form

[dtjohnson]

Microsoft has extended the idea of using paid studies as propaganda to support its corporate goals to a point far beyond what any other large corporation has done. The Microsoft 'freedom to innovate' crap was memorable during the Netscape/DOJ antitrust debacle a few years ago. Does this stuff really work? Sadly, I suppose it must or they wouldn't do it.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[Valar]

Stored Procedures in MySQL 5

three-button mice?

[budgenator]

The problem is that most people don't have three-button mice.

Poppy-cock, most people do have at least three buttons on their mouse now, the last two button mouse in our office was connected to a P60, Packard-Bell. The mice with a scroll wheel register as 5 buttons, left, right, scroll wheel straight down is middle and rolling forward and backward are 4 and 5. Your case is an exception rather than the norm.

Re: three-button mice?

[daviddennis]

A good point, and one I hadn't thought of.

That being said, I'll bet 95% of the population thinks of their scroll wheel as a wheel, not a button.

And of course many of those people who use Linux don't realize a third button is a virtual requirement, or what it does.

You might say that even a cursory reading of documentation should tell them there is, but as you know that's pretty optimistic for the average person.

D

Open Source cheaper or more expensive?!?

[missing_boy]

Darl McBride just said in his plea to Congress that Open Source software was un-capitalistic and took away revenue from American businesses; M$ is saying that Linux costs more, not through cost of purchase or licensing, but through service and support; now, which is it: cheaper or more expensive?

Missing the point anyway...

[groovemaneuver]

I don't believe for a moment that all factors have been taken into account in this study. For example, they make the main competitor for Win+SQL Server to be Linux+Oracle -- most shops I know of use either MySQL or PostgreSQL -- a better study would have compared Win32+Oracle and Linux+Oracle. But even if the study was perfectly valid and honest, the one aspect of Linux that's noticeably not mentioned (and that is probably the key factor in anyone's decision to deploy Linux or even BSD) is the openness and freedom.

Sure there's the usually GPL bullshit FUD that's always mentioned, but my answer to that has always been: if you rely on the code that someone else has written as the core for your own work, either A) pony up and publish your results, or B) write your own damn code.

I generally think of RMS as somewhat of an extremist (many good ideas, but some pretty whacked-out ones mixed in there too), but to me the GPL is pretty simple 'cause it always comes back to your own choices and decisions. Don't like it? Don't use it.

I don't believe that running Linux is more expensive, but even it was, I think the people that have chosen that route wouldn't change, simply because the non-financial related freedoms that Linux/BSD bring are conspicuously missing from Windows. It really seems that MS hates that people actually now have the freedom of choice.

...just my opinions...

Don't worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft funding really does benefit Linux! Your website even proves it with that large, prominantly displayed Microsoft advertisement on the right of the front page.

These studies are for lazy IT people

[rspress]

These studies must be for lazy IT people who wish to toe the MS line. I have talked to several people who administer networks and the only reason they use Microsoft products is job security. If they had a trouble free network that anyone could administer..they would no longer be needed.

They have used these articles that Microsoft put out to convince the people who control the purse strings that MS is the way to go..and thus their job is safe.

So Microsoft continues to pump out the propaganda that their systems are cheaper, more secure and all around better that Linux, Unix and MacOS X. All of this while the world is crippled by viruses every few months and more money is paid to MS to update systems.

Even Bill Gates comments a few days ago that Microsofts systems are more secure than any other platform must have made some poeple gush with pride...the facts, when not paid for by Microsoft, tell the real truth.

These studies also call into question the bias of the companies that do the studies. How can we believe the Gartner group on anything when they fudge the details for Microsoft.

WebLogic playing catch-up with JBOSS? Not.

[monkeycoder]

Responding to the last comment in the parent post:

Actually, JBOSS has led the way in features, with Weblogic playing catch-up.

Versions of BEA WebLogic were fully released to the world before the first line of JBOSS code was even written - so how could JBOSS "lead the way"? (Aspects? *sarcasm*)

most people I know who have used both prefer JBOSS.

True in context, but useless information otherwise. Who are these people? Here is statement that is also true in context, but equally useless: Most people I know that have used both prefer WebLogic. Now here is something harder to argue with: BEA WebLogic's customer list at BEA's website. I invite all and sundry to post a link to comparable list for JBOSS.

Of course JBOSS may have its uses, being free, but it otherwise simply fails to directly match up with *any* commercial app server, not just WebLogic. And the failure is not just in features and customer base, but also in terms of testing, reliability, performance, long term support, J2EE certification, professionalism, and documentation. And these differences, for anyone that bothers to do even a small amount of research, aren't small.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[Anthony Boyd]

Also, why does everyone ignore Firebird (the database)?

Firebird was born when Borland open-sourced their database product. I worked at Borland for a number of years. You would think I would be its biggest advocate, rather than giving quotes to promote a non-ACID competitor. But let me tell you why I, and possibly other people, haven't embraced Firebird-the-database. First, having worked at Borland, I saw some of its problems up close & personal. We tried to move borland.com to a database-backed site at one point, and our own product couldn't keep up with the load. Of course, this was 1998, so it's old news. Someone at the company, whose name I wish I could remember, eventually built a smart little system that would pre-generate every possible combination of db-built pages, and pre-load our server with hundreds of thousands of static HTML files. This worked, as the database never took any direct hits, and only had to rebuild the pages at midnight each night. However, since I had just come off a bad experience with IntraBuilder (now cancelled, partly thanks to me & Chris Malatesta trying to use it on borland.com, and watching it crash & burn), I was really wary, and felt that the database was a big compromise.

In addition, the database at the time had a number of bad limitations. One was that, even after deleting records, the database size would grow. We had a customer that wanted to create and delete about a million records a day, but after a month, the database size looked like it housed 30 million records, not 1 million. I initially just assumed that the indexes were not properly maintained, but since Borland eventually lost the customer, I assume a simple regen of the indexes didn't fix it. And of course, as most of us know, after the database was open-sourced, a pretty severe exploit was found, and it existed in all or nearly all versions, including the proprietary ones. That the open-source guys found the exploit and repaired it is a testament to OSS. And as further testament, I just assume that they've tightened up the code now to the point that every previous complaint or concern I've had is moot.

So what's the problem? Well, in the last 6 years, I've left Borland, and found better databases (IMHO) in MySQL and PostgreSQL. MySQL had a reputation for being very basic, but very fast without a lot of tuning, and very easy, and very reliable. PostgreSQL had a reputation for being (nearly) as feature-complete as Oracle. Over the last few years, I've simply defaulted to them -- they're what I know, they're what I use, they work, and I've not had a reason to look elsewhere. And I think that's Firebird's problem: the bulk of Web people have already been in the business for a while, and already grown accustomed to other databases. It's inertia.

To solve this, one of the only things I can think of would be an anti-MySQL campaign, where you clearly outlined MySQL's silent error problem. It's the only problem I've had with MySQL -- this scenario where it doesn't process the request properly, and silently discards it or picks some (never quite right) defaults. I'm currently getting this with some date fields, where it helpfully inserts an unexpected 0000-00-00 date. If someone documented all those issues, and explained them simply, and showed better alternatives, it might open up people's minds. Of course, in my case, I'm enough of a MySQL fan that I'd rather just wait for Monty & others to improve their product. But I'm sure some people could be encouraged to reconsider their loyalties. And until they do, Firebird could be better but still have no mindshare.

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[DunbarTheInept]

It is *always* possible to make biased reports like these if you have the deception skills of Microsoft PR. (Or, more importantly the unethical willingness to do so.) So changing the system so the specific issue the biased report is focusing on is taken care of doesn't *really* help. You can work toward that one small issue, but leave behind the millions more that could be exploited. It's like trying to move a puddle using a rake.

The real problem is that the marketplace is populated by people who can't see the flaws in the reports. If the average consumer isn't making informed buying decisions, then all other consumers collectively suffer because of it. (Which is one flaw in the notion that a free market will automatically be a corruption-free place in which everyone gets only what they deserve. The premise that your buying decisions affect only yourself isn't true.)

Now, there's a shock

[joelrmpls]

Microsoft finds that MS stuff is less expensive than free? I'm shocked, shocked.

DirectX vs OpenGl

[DunbarTheInept]

Comparing DirectX to OpenGL is like comparing an entire apple tree to a single orange. OpenGL is a graphics library ONLY. In that, it does very, very well and beats Direct3D. But DirectX is a graphics library (Direct3D) AND a whole lot of other stuff - a game input device system (for joysticks, pads, tactile feedback systems, and action keyboard drivers) - and a sound system.

What would be nice about a DirectX equivilent for Linux would be that it is handy to encapsulate all that game-related driver stuff into one package, with one version number - so you can say "To run this program you need gamelib release 7 installed" - instead of "You need release 4.1.1 of foo, and release 1.0.1 of bar, and release 0.5.1.23 of baz, and ..."

Re:DirectX vs OpenGl

[pandrijeczko]

Thanks for clarifying that.

A question for you though...

If a Unix or Linux system has a kernel that provides a hardware abstraction layer, why do you need a DirectX-like layer on top of that?

The kernel speaks to the appropriate hardware drivers, as I programmer you need to do nothing more than address /dev/snd (for example) to access the sound device.

I can see a reason why you'd have a separate graphics library like OpenGL because then, as a programmer, you get to access all the graphics acceleration stuff.

But wouldn't a DirectX layer be pointless on Linus/Unix? Or am I missing something?

Re:DirectX vs OpenGl

[DunbarTheInept]

There are good design reasons for not coding directly to the hardware level, and having things fall through several layers of abstraction along the way, right? I mean, like how the c library's printf talks to the more low level write() function, which talks to the filesystem driver, which talks to the device driver, etc... Well, the sort of thing that DirectX does would sit at a level above the /dev files. It's an additional abstraction layer on top of the device driver. (So, for example, a program would run a function call along the lines of "I want to know if the user is hitting a directional button on any of the input devices right now, be it keyboard or joystick or gamepad. Is the user pushing a button right now, and if so tell me what it is.", instead of talking directly to the gamepad's device driver, then the keyboard driver, then the joystick driver.)

Two words:

[Rudisaurus]

Mydoom / Novarg

Bad spelling...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting enough this article on compairing is followed by another on bad spelling

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[Fuzzy Bo]

Putting Microsoft and Boeing in the same sentence reminded me of this article by Bill Parish, entitled "Microsoft Financial Pyramid Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, the Boeing Corporation, and Destabilizes Government Tax Revenues" http://www.billparish.com/20010322boeingandmsft.ht ml

commerical statistics

[innerweb]

Almost every time MS comes out with some research, I get an instant flashback to the old 2 out of 3 dentists surveyed use blah, blah, blah.

Commercial research is not about the truth unless it is internal. It is all about marketing spin. Even if the research is double blind, the basis for the research (the questions, the assumptions) can and do skew the results.

It is very difficult to get unbiased research anywhere. A sponsor to the research just makes it that much more biased (it impacts what questions you ask, how you ask the questions, what assumptions you make...)

If companies were honest, we would not buy half the stuff we buy. The fact that we buy stuff from companies that lie to us is either a testament to our (as a population) extreme lack of education, or the expertise with which we are lied to. A study passes under most people's radar because the truth is used to build the disinformation. That is why so much damage control is done with research.

Yep, you can.

[khasim]

But are you going to tell me that that is a good way of fixing an app that doesn't work on Windows? Just copy the registry settings from a working machine? :)

Re:Yep, you can.

[Foolhardy]

In general, no. It all depends on what is actually wrong with the app.
I agree that with most apps (on Windows), reinstallation is a standard way to fix things. This is not a good thing. I usually try to fix them without resorting to reinstallation.

IDC appears to be lying^H^H^H^H^Hslanted.

[Dr. Zowie]

Agree agree. The IDC report assumes that the Linux networking server requires $940 in software, while the Microsoft server only requires $211. I see no mention of the Windows license itself, and I know that most common networking tools for Linux are free. Similarly, there's a mysterious line "Outsourced" that claims a Linux networking server will require $946 of outsourced charging, while the Windows server will require $26. (IDC report, p. 10, Table 3).

On page 12, they account for the higher Linux software and outsourcing (custom software development) cost by acknowledging that many shops build custom management software to tie together existing components, and custom software costs more than off-the-shelf stuff. But there's no mention at all of the cost of the Windows license to run the server. Perhaps they're assuming it's bundled with the hardware?

They also claim that Linux shops tend to buy commercial application software for functionality that is included in Windows. The example they use is a directory server: while Windows 2000 comes bundled with a directory server, they claim that a Linux user would have to buy one from Sun or IBM. But freeware solutions do come bundled with Linux: LDAP, YP, and MySQL are a few. Hence, they're comparing apples and oranges -- both Windows and Linux shops have existing solutions bundled with their OS, but the study only charges the Linux shops for 3rd party software. Furthermore, the poor Linux shop appears to be being charged for both a commercial product (the Software line) and custom development (the Outsourcing line). If either of these were eliminated, the costs of Windows and Linux would be within $200 of one another for this solution; if both were eliminated or the cost of the Windows server license were included, Linux would appear cheaper.

Similarly, the File Sharing description (p. 13) shows that Linux has less downtime and lower cost of acquisition (p. 14); but higher staff training costs (probably true) and much higher staffing costs. The only supporting evidence is "...IDC believes that this is another example of how a relatively new operating environment is unable to offer the same ease of management that is available for an incumbent, well-known operating environment" (p. 13). I smell the fine, crisp smell of bullshit.

If the staffing costs were equalized (assuming that you hire someone at the MCSE level and then spend the extra money to train her, as accounted for in the Training column) then Linux would be head and shoulders above Windows for this application.

I stopped reading there -- the smell of numbers being cooked became overpowering.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[man_of_mr_e]

Comparing PG w/ Access shows that you've never used PG.

I think you need to reread my message. I did not compare Postgre to Access. I compared MySQL to Access. While Access is not client/server, it has about the same feature set as MySQL.

Postgres is in the same league as MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and others. It is not quite as tunable as Oracle, and Oracle can scale higher, but not higher enough to be in a completely different league.

Now you're just exagerating things. I said Postgre was a capable midrange database, which is what it is. those "limitations" you mention are what seperate an enterprise class dbms from a midrange one. Little things like replication, clustering, large memory (PAE) support, OLAP and other kinds of data mining tools. Hell, even features that I would consider "basic" in an enterprise class dbms are missing, such as an equivelent to DTS or Full Text search, not to mention woefully inadequate XML support.

Postgre essentially supports most of the ANSI standard, but that's not enough to make it "enterprise class". Merely performing well and having an acceptable optimizer are also not enough.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Postgre sucks. It's a very capable system, it's just not in the same class as Oracle or SQL Server, other than at the basic SQL level.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[juan2074]

So, why is Byron Acohido, the author of those stories about the 737 rudder problems now working for USA Today (the newspaper for people who can't read)?

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[juan2074]

Please don't tell me you actually read the classifieds.

Those are published mainly as cage liners for people with pet birds or hamsters.

Windows is cheaper than diamond encrusted Linux

[rastin]

Just read, ok I scaned, through that 1MB word doc. Try searching it for (Apache, Perl, PHP, Python, OpenOffice, Sendmail, mySQL). Guess what? 0 hits. But Oracle, BEA, Web Sphere, DB2 all show up. Wait I get it. Windows is cheaper than Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a lot of expensive software. By the way that near 1MB word doc is smaller as an OpenOffice file. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Bill.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[steve_l]

I do not disagree with you on the basis that Oracle is very much better than mysql. But I think that far too many apps are written where people assume they need oracle, weblogic and the hardware to go with, and the full time oracle-database-tuner that accompanies the lot, when simpler is better. MySQL to java works well (Better than the SQL server drivers), and gets the job done.

Access doesnt cut it BTW, cos access doesnt have the concurrency to be the back end for anything.

Re:WebLogic playing catch-up with JBOSS? Not.

[steve_l]

Yes jboss is weak in docs, at least in free docs. I bet most of the companies revenue comes from docs.

The other oddity is business model -I know more ex-jboss developers than current ones, and the whole Apache Geronimo thing really puts a question mark round their product. Apache will be able to get access to the J2EE tests for free, so will be able to sort-of-certify their product.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[steve_l]

Yes, it really depends on the app. The choice of oracle and weblogic biases the whole thing to towards MS, to the point that it should be a 'IIS cheaper than WebLogic and SQL server cheaper than Oracle' survey, not a Windows cheaper than Linux.

Still, I bet Oracle+Weblogic on commodity x86 costs less than the same software on solaris :)

Though of course, because both of these have per-cpu licenses, they are expensive when you go for many mid-range CPUs rather than one or two of Intel's top of the line Xeon parts.

The Funny Part is...

[WindBourne]

it is always the same groups over and over. Not a truely independant group, but the same 4 or 5. This would be akin to the democrats doing a study on any of the candidates or the republican party doing a study on Bush. Gee, I wonder what the results will look like?

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is utterly sick. I can just picture my friends, friends who I constantly advise to use linux, countering my linux arguements with "M$ said it's more expensive to maintain and was out performed by M$."

The idea that windows is cheaper than linux doesn't make any sense, firstly: a windows OS is about $200.00, right? I've never paid for anything but hardware (most of which is old--another good thing about linux); other than that, everything's free.

In what way is linux more expensive than M$? Let us just concentrate on the fact that a windows OS automatically forces you to either pay extra for a new, pre-assembled machine or to pay $200.00 for the OS. That alone is enough to discredit the study.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Hahhaaaa. Actually, I skim the classifieds, looking to see if there are actually any jobs for IT guys in Seattle anymore. Nope... By the way, would you like fries with that?

Commoditization

[budgenator]

windows staff is cheaper
If that is true, and personaly I believe it, it's because Microsoft has managed to commoditize Microsoft staff. Seems like everybody and his brother has written a book on getting an MCSE, or an A+ cert. You can find MCSE's on the sales staff, and I'm talking about commercial, shrink-wrapped sales, not specialized custom apps.

I know this sounds like flamebait, and I don't mean it that way, but the truth is that there are a lot of people who got a Microsoft cert, after taking a brain-dump course only because they wanted their ticket punched. Of course all of these TCO studies are going to ignore the expense of repairing the damage these cert jockeys, that's both in-house damage and collateral damage caused when their collective bummbling allow the nest worm to blast thru the internet.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[Inspector Lopez]

... Because Byron Acohido's stories were themselves bullshit. If you want to see why, read Michael Crichton's novel "Airframe."

Lost in all the handwringing and moralizing of Acohido's articles was the fact that he couldn't be troubled to either

(a) understand statistics, or
(b) understand that you don't just change parts willy-nilly on hundred-ton flying machines.

Acohido may have won a Pulitzer, but if he was smart, he'd fly on a 737 to receive it.

And the original parent of this series is just wrong. Seattle has *plenty* of skepticism about Microsoft and Windows. Assertions to the contrary are, simply, false. My own research lab (at the UW in Electrical Engineering) has been linux exclusively since about 1996. We had been running Solaris before that, butl hardware and software cost and instant code portability made linux irresistible. MS found out about our beowulf cluster, and offered to give us enough NT for all of them --- however it was obvious that this would have been a huge setback for us. We said "no thanks" obviously.

Re:By your logic (OT)

[Inspector Lopez]

If JimBob SixPack funds research comparing three mechanics, and he's a mechanic ,and he's One of the three in the study, and "it just so happens" that the study finds JimBob SixPack is the best place to get your car serviced - that's suspicious (ie we "suspect" that the study results were influenced by the source of funding)

Some of you may recall that, 'way back in 2000, George Bush asked Dick Cheney to perform a study to figure out whom would be the best VP to run with Bush. You'll never guess what happened.

Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the Slashdot crowd is at it again with the MS paid studies.
Last time this happened was in late 98 or early 99 when a Microsoft sponsored study showed NT4 to be vastly superior to Linux as a webserver.
The Linux zealots insisted that the study was rigged. If I had a dime for each time one of you idiots told me that "the NT4 server had to be optimized to death while the Linux server wasn't" I wouldn't need to work anymore.
Microsoft had the study redone but that didn't convince anybody.
And still, months later Torvalds himself admitted that NT4 was in fact kicking Linux' ass in the web server department. It took him a while but he had to admit it.

Re:Not entirely BS: Linux' response

[Moofie]

If relational databases had no advantages and many disadvantages WRT CSV files, the answer to your question would be "yes".

Now, upon departing from Bizarro World, and understanding that your comparison has nothing whatsoever in common with the matter at hand, the answer to your question is "no".

Does that clear things up for you?

well for starters

[themusicgod1]

i don't like the motorola land mine swarm support in 2.8.6, and the matrix style neural interface support in 2.10.5.

actually you have a good point:)

+1 Interesting?

[goldfndr]

Hmm. 4 out of 5... that's 80%. But supposedly Microsoft has 90%+ of the market. So Microsoft just paid to run an ad urging over 10% of the market to leave them for Linux >:)

This should've been moderated Funny; I mean, how likely is it that the fifth scenario occurs 20% of the time? Maybe it occurs 40% of the time!

Webobjects.

[Malcontent]

$700.00. Kicks ass, robust, scalable, includes IDE and app server. Pleasure to work with.

Powers of ten

[SgtChaireBourne]

That should be $ 9 868 000 000 USD instead. Sad day when even powers of ten kick ones butt.

The facts about Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

On their facts about Linux website, M$ compares a Windows 2003 Server with a mainframe running linux. I'm sorry, but if you have to compare those to make a point, you already lost the battle guys.

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[man_of_mr_e]

I agree with you that lots of people use Oracle that don't need to. I also agree that MySQL is a fine database for many uses.

Access can handle concurrency with little trouble, it simply doesn't scale very well. It's impractical to have more than 10-20 concurrent users, primarily because the access drivers need physical file access and are not client/server.

MySQL has the advantage of scaling better than Access, but featurewise it's about on par.

Outright lies

[glacote02]

Open the the first report (http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/b/8/db85 43a5-1e19-42e6-b0e3-d17ae2c2a9d2/IDC20TCO20Paper.p df) comparing Windows to Linux system administration.
Go to page 10, scroll down to the summarizing table.
Now observe the costs, especially in the column labelled "security".

Yes, you are right, IDC found that securing a Linux box costs $6,609 in software (!), which happens to be more (!!) than on Microsoft Windows.

This speaks for itself ...