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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?
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.
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...