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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."
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.
/. 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.
On the
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).
"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??!?
In other news, recent market studies have a massive decline in the demand for porn on the Internet, and...
Is it possible to mod Stories as redundant?
Sat here watching my karma go wheeeeeee all the way down ;)
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.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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.
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.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
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..."
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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!)
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?"
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Did they miss out the 000,000 somewhere?
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.
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
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Looking at the
.NET vs J2EE/Linux study
.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.
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
So yes, the study was utterly rigged. It makes a valid critique of using WebLogic and Oracle, but says nothing about Linux/JBoss/mysql.
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
It's not what they call you, it's what you answer to.
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..."
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yeah Yeah I know - don't feed the trolls/ACs, but this just needs a comment.
,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 JimBob SixPack funds research comparing three mechanics, and he's a mechanic
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.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
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.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
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.
.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.
.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.
For example: our company writes software for Microsoft's
If I were to write an article for an IT magazine praising
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.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &