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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."
In the first interview question, he not only shows a correct grasp of the marketplace (Linux is a technology used by businesses to produce competing products/services, not a competitor in itself) but also brilliantly spins it ("It was thought of as free." -- love it!).
Why the heck is Ballmer still in charge if they have someone who makes sense? Perhaps if this guy had been in charge of promoting
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
He does have a point. Linux by itself isn't a product that a company can buy. MS should be more concerned with the companies that distribute it (along with support contracts et al).
In the end, any sane company shouldn't care who supplies the product, as long as said product is suitable for their needs, within their budget and will be have overall positive impact on their business as usual. As long as companies like SUSE, RedHat and such are providing a good quality product, and devs like Torvalds are improving it then MS have something to worry about.
This is all quite similar to the old adage that Linux by itself is not an OS, it's the tools that are usually supplied with it that make it a usable environment.
From the article:
> In the last 12 months, about 35 percent of the
> base has moved to Windows 2000. It's accelerating.
> We will see in this calendar year another third of
> the base move. It's a pretty small percentage of
> customers on NT 4.0 -- less than 20 percent. Japan
> is higher than that. The United States is lower.
> But the vast majority of customers will move by
> the end of this year
Based on my own experience, I'd dispute these figures. Over the last 12-24 months, I've worked at several banks, General Motors, General Electric, and large government bodies. Every one of them has loads of NT 4 servers in production, and no plans to migrate a lot of these systems because they just work.
Many of them still use NT 4 on the desktop too. I've got no idea how the licencing for this works, but many many people who work for these companies are logging into NT 4 each day.
If this guy is talking about migrating their customer-facing systems to Win 2000 or 2003, then I'd believe that - these companies roll out new customer-facing systems very quickly and not many *customer-facing* systems more than a few years old are still out there. However, it isn't stated in this interview that he's excluding back-office and end-user systems in these migration figures. You'd be right if you guessed that customer-facing systems make up a tiny percentage of overall system numbers at these sites.
There must be a lot of Slashdotters working at similar large sites - what have you encountered in terms of migration rates, and the number of NT 4 systems still in operation?
Q: Is Linux a competator?
A: No Linux isn't a competator.
12-28 months ago the world was a distant a far away place. There was a lot of misconceptions about Linux. For instance People thought it was Free.
But first and formost we are a software company and we concintrate on software and lower the cost of ownership of our software.
The world is weird. We compete not against software, but against people that deploy linux as part of their solution.
IBM is our biggest competator, but we compete against Redhat and Novell, too. When companies use Linux we compete against them, but when HP sells Windows we are partners.
But we don't compete against linux. What linux is there to compete, when you ask that? What distro, what company?
Q: When is longhorn server and client coming out?
Longhorn client will become beta in 2005 so that may be released 2006 or 2007. Who knows?
But longhorn server will be completely out in 2007.
For a long time people in MS were dreaming, but now we are in reality mode, so a lot of the stuff we were talking about and promising was is not ever going to happen.
But Blackhorn will have lots of that stuff, but it can take 4 years, because longhorn takes 4 years.
And we are working on R2, and SP2, but I don't know how hard we are working on it, but a lot of the people are. The interface team is working hard on longhorn.
Windows is incredably complicated.
It is like a space station or something very big, because it is so complex. Windows is very complicated.
We have lots of stuff.
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.
No, that doesn't make any sense, especially in a buisness model. Sure, the OS itself can be free, the installation, free, but you have extra costs:
1. Paying to teach the administrators the new distro that they are not used to administrating on
2. Paying to teach the employees how to use the new distro that they are not used to working on
3. Payment for code conversion (if not already cross compatible) to switch from windows to linux, so the employess can use the company programs.
4. Payment for rollover and backups, so that they can be implimented properly and without a laspe of time between OS switches.
5. Payment for the entire time spent on computers/terminals that will be out of the loop during the time it takes the OS switch to occur. This is a statement of fact, even if done one computer at a time or entire sections.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
While wide-ranging, this guy's answers are really vague. I am none the wiser for it. What the hell does he mean by "We're taking the concept of transferring information across the life cycle of the business application and ingraining it in as part of the process. DSI is all about information transfer between a developer, the operations center and the end user. There are ways to do that on a surface level, and there are ways to build that deeper into the OS, and that's what we are doing."?? Like, are they going to provide a pack of Sticky Notes (TM, did they buy 3M?) with every copy of Longhorn or Blackcomb that they sell so that the developer may leave a note for the user? That's one way of "ingraining" info. And while I'm at it, why is he touting complexity as a good thing? AFAIK the more parts there are, the bigger the chance of something breaking down. New security holes, here we come.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Microsoft has had trouble getting some customers to move from older versions of Windows, like Windows NT 4.0.
In the last 12 months, about 35 percent of the base has moved to Windows 2000. It's accelerating.
I wonder what % of that is forced to move due to the unpatchability of NT4 against recent worms like Sasser?
I've been a Linux admin for a few years now, mostly at the SME level. I have never had much of a budget, and consequently never used or installed a commercial Linux product with the expectation of support.....but guess what - never been completely stumped.
:)
Usenet - rarely use it - google is my #1 support resource these days, after pulling my hair out for a while, I email - guess who - the guy who *actually* wrote the code - not some 16 year old who's collecting call stats, not some manager type who thinks the world will spin off it's axis if their company cops any form of responsibility for their product by admitting a fault...I just email them, they offer a suggestion, and it usually works. Now thats support!! (the Linux hackers are mostly totally cool, and they have PRIDE in their work)
Oh and it's fine to say - well home users shouldn't need to hack source code, but seriously, if you're an admin - you should know at least 2-3 languages - not overly well, but well enough to fix small bugs IMHO (if you are, and you can't - get involved - hack some kde stuff to make your life easier, then share it at kde-apps.org or sumfin
This is a first step towards Microsoft deeming open source solutions ready for the market place.
No doubt that Microsoft will start using the linux kernel once they think it will make them more profitable.
He's opening up the possibility that Microsoft themselves could make use of that technology whereas that would be inconceivable if Linux itself were their competitor.
It's an interesting development.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It's true that the average person does not care whether their kernel is Linux or NT or BSD or whatever. But there has been a lot of growth in the computing community in the past years. I remember when I first started playing with Linux in 1996, nobody i knew in real life knew anything about it, and at that point in time I would say most people didnt even know there was an alternative to OS/2 / DOS / Win 3.1 / Win 95. But now there are a lot of people who have been exposed to a *nix variant of some sort and understand the benefits of being able to customize the kernel. Then again it could be the same idea behind cars. I always compared Windows to an automatic and linux/freebsd to a standard. It might require a little more work but you'll have more control and usually more noticeable power with standards (linux/freebsd), but sometimes people don't care how it runs and just like to get from point A to point B without having to work much [automatic] (Windows).
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
Look, business is a dirty, bare knuckles kind of thing. You find the choicest customer, become his friend, and use that relationship to tar the competitor. With Linux, MS must discredit the very idea of working anybody but MS. True, a lot of customers think this way; but it is a result, not a strategy. MS wants to create this worldview, but it can't rely on it to be stable in and of itself
:)
I wonder if this is a subtle change of policy for MS? By defining Linux as just another technology, that opens the door for MS using it, too. Not that Microsoft would ever release GPL'd software; but my prediction is that they will have a BSD-based Unix on the market around 2010. Apple did it, so they will too...
Microsoft has been on the offensive lately. Trying to avoid people from migrating away from their security hole ridden operating system to Linux, Mac OSX and the BSDs. I hope companies don't sit still and stop innovating their own products fearing Microsoft will wipe them out. e.g. Macromedia adoption of Central has slowed down because many people are waiting for Indigo and Avalon.
I am not a Linux fanboy. I used what is good for my productivity. My primary desktop is a mac running Mac OS 10.3, that, alas, blows Windows out of this world. My production servers run Linux Debian.
My regular computer runs a web and a database server. I process graphics applications and run resource hungry software on it. I restart it only when it comes to software updates.
The real problem with Windows is that M$ never learns from its mistakes. They keep producting crap they call Windows without looking at other options. Apple has learned that with certain Open Source technology it could revive itself and create some room for developers. What about Microsoft? Instead of creating, innovating and developing the next big thing they dump millions into law suits.
Here is my take. MS simply takes too long to release new features and capabilities into the Windows line. Come on, WinFS is a file system. Its going to take them until the "end of the decade" to release a file system? Slack off the world domination lockin strategy of uber-integration and technology dependencies, and release a more modular OS.
Linux has the opposite problem. The pace of development and modularization of the system is excellent. But, the integration by the distributors is poor. From a clean vanilla install of any of the major distros too many pices do no work correctly. If the distro installs it off the media it should at least be tested and working.
I'm getting frustrated with both camps atm.