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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."
That lazy penguin's no match fro Clippy.
Gee, I wonder how much longer he's gonna be around at MS.
I thought this article looked familiar. It's actually from C|Net's news.com.com.
He's just playing good cop...
'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.'
He realized that it is hard to fight Linux itself, because there is no single company producing it. So he aims at companies offering Linux as an alternative to Windows in order to solve specific problems.
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.
'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.'
Well, that's true enough. Linux does NOT compete with Microsoft, and in fact never did. A Linux distribution company such as Red Hat competes with Microsoft and a Linux distribution competes with a Microsoft product such as NT.
It's like back in the day, Intel sent a sales rep to my (then) employer asking how Intel could help us. We explained the score to him: we don't buy Intel. What we buy is Compaq (i.e. complete systems) and if they happen to have Intel in fair enough, but really, that's Compaq's decision, we don't care.
Thus it is with Linux. The average person DOES NOT CARE whether the kernel on their system is Linux or the NT kernel or Mach or anything else. They just want to run their applications to get the stuff they want to do done.
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
From the article:
Muglia must keep a long train of updates and service packs for older versions of Windows rolling off the production line
WOAH, slow down with all those service packs for XP microsoft!
If the service packs for XP were actually a train, the would be only one carriage.. but that carriage would be bloody long!
Live in your skin. Keep changing the scenery.
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?
A server shouldn't need to be the most complicated thing ever. Fundamentally, it does a fairly simple job. Making it 'more complex than ever' makes me want to use something else! (I'm a Tech. Director).
Wouldn't it be cool if MS said "Hey this new OS will use half the resources, be 99% secure, and run on a reasonable spec PC, and be simple to use and understand". Don't think we'll be getting that somehow though...
Still, I suppose from a business point of view they have to keep swimming, like sharks.
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
When i slap together a new LAMP server on linux it sure as heck is taking business away from Microsoft. A DNS, DHCP, Firewall, mailfilter/AV is today only a couple of cd's away for most admins with half a brain. And the best part? It doesnt cost a dime!
Even if Microsft successfully attacks all the companies selling linux there will still be a significant marketshare who is using linux on servers. What Microsoft should do is start selling applications and services to linux, like a full blown emulator for win32 and Office for Linux.
That way they wouldnt have to kill competition to earn money. Sometimes it feals like killing the competition is the goal and making money just a side effect.
HTTP/1.1 400
the guy says:
"... and we think about software-based solutions to information technology problems and how our software can drive down cost. That's pretty distinct from, say, an IBM that is first and foremost a consulting company. Our focus is how to provide more out-of-the-box solutions that don't require those consulting services."
MS always uses the "low cost - no need for expertise" argument, yet always fails to deliver. windows consultants will always be needed. IMHO, when you make a swiss-knife piece of software, you'll always need an expert to implement that part of the swiss knife you actually need in a specific situation.
i don't think you'll spend less on consultancy, as compared to other solutions such as linux...
He's quite right here. Linux isn't a competitor - it's just a kernel. GNU/Linux is a competitor. GNU/Linux with X and KDE is a dangerous competitor. But Linux on its own is not a big problem.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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...