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Bob Muglia on Longhorn Server, Linux and Blackcomb
An anonymous reader writes "In a wide-ranging interview, Microsoft's senior VP Bob Muglia talks about the work involved in getting Longhorn Server out by 2007. He also gives the lowdown on the next major release of Windows Server, code-named Blackcomb. 'If Indigo (a major feature of Longhorn) took four years to develop, some major infrastructure things inside Blackcomb will also take four years to develop,' Muglia said. On competition from Linux, he said: 'When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor. I think about Linux as a technology that is used by our competitors to build competitive offerings.' Very different from what Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates have been saying but Muglia says he's trying to teach them a thing or two."
I thought this article looked familiar. It's actually from C|Net's news.com.com.
He goes on to say the main competitors are FIRMS that sell Linux, such as IBM and RedHat. In other words, there is no Linux, Inc. or a single Linux product.
Reminds me a study I read about in an industry rag some months back. It concluded that Windows is n times more pervasive than Linux because that is how much more people spend on buying their OS.
Just the small fact that Linux is FREE and what you really pay for wheny buying a Linux distro such as RedHat or SuSe is support.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
We have 5 sites all running NT4 on desktops and servers. At least 1000 desktops per site with between 10-20 servers per site with the odd HP-UX one holding a massive customer database.
Everything - bar the database servers - is being migrated to XP. And I mean everything. I shudder to think what the licensing costs were...
OK, I am a surgeon working in a similar large university hospital. We have recently (2003) moved off of a system employing IBM PC-compatible terminals booting off a floppy(!), to a WinTerm-based system for accessing the DOS program for laboratory data. For anyone outside the hospital, they have a web-access portal that is only usable with IE due to ActiveX controls. I don't know wtf the IT people at our hospital are thinking with their dedication to Microsoft, but hey, I am only a dumb surgeon, I don't know jack about computers (:-;), and the "computer professionals" can go ahead and do their work. I will wait for the day when I can easily access my patients' data from home via my Debian Sid desktop without tweaking my system to get Internet Explorer to work under WINE.
In 2000, MSFT's roadmap said Longhorn was expected to be out in 2002, and Blackcomb would come out in 2004, so much for being on time.
I wonder what % of that is forced to move due to the unpatchability of NT4 against recent worms like Sasser?
Doh. NT isn't vulnerable to Sasser.
So to get around UI centric thread scheduling, and poor transaction management, MS is building indigo to "fix it." I can't help but think it's the wrong approach. Transaction monitors have been around a long time and there are people who know how to build them correctly. For those who say, "but look at TPC benchmarks!" Well guess what, they're using Tuxedo wrapped in COM+ and SQL Server has an custom embedded C component to improve performance.
Can you scale windows? Sure you can if you use tested technologies like transaction monitors and wrap them with COM+ and you write a high performance C module for Sql Server. Don't take my word for it. Go read all the HP full disclosures to see how they achieved those numbers.