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."

Comments

They come and they go...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I think of Linux, I don't think about it as our competitor.

-and-

Muglia says he's trying to teach them a thing or two. (Gates and Balmer)

Gee, I wonder how much longer he's gonna be around at MS.

Re:They come and they go...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:They come and they go...

[hey!]

OK ok, so its not a competitor but a competing product, and the companies such as RH, suse selling it and providing support are the competitors. What is the practical difference?

For one thing, it's way harder to fight. It means they aren't fighting a competitor, they are fighting a paradigm shift. IBM may wave the Linux flag, but the real danger is that they are getting away from selling software and focusing on solving problems for businesses more cheaply. SCO could kill Linux, and IBM could switch over to BSD without scarcely missing a beat.

As long as people are buying a brand or a worldview or a technology strategy, MS in unstoppable because they define the battleground and charge admission. If people look at problems they have defined for themselves and how to solve them most cheaply, MS no longer defines the battleground and a lot of the stuff that's designed to keep Microsoft in charge of the gates becomes irrelevant.

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.

Accurate assessment

[sql*kitten]

'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.

Stating the obvious

[upside]

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.

Re:Stating the obvious

[Asphixiat]

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 :)

Re:Article originated from

[builderwag]

Well, actually, a better and longer version first appeared on Techworld.

Sure...

[xxx_Birdman_xxx]

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!

Re:No competition

[D4MO]

"Hey, it looks like you need to spell check!"

Migration

[darnok]

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?

Re:Migration

[kd4evr]

Good question!

Every corporate user (or group of users) faces a dilemma:

- stick with the good ol' NT 4 stuff which they finally mastered and managed to put in some kind of stable and working order, not only to avoid pitfalls with new bugs (oops, features) but also to avoid W2k and XP specific viral and security exploits to limit their security update efforts;

- or migrate at some point, hoping to avoid both old aches and pains as well as lack of features and interoperability compared to those entitites who migrated already.

Considering all side factors (sysadmin skills and preferences, ability to spend & invest in infrastructure), parent (darnok) has a point: those who hadn't yet migrated, are not likely to do so unless they are lured into a honeytrap of some sort: either new value, package deals or discounts, etc.

Finnaly, if those (probably smart) people would want to migrate, wouldn't they consider all options and likely consider the competition - give linux driven solutions a go?

Re:Migration

[Baki]

I know a large swiss bank using w2k for windows server (all real servers are solaris or mainframe) and still NT4 for desktop. It is being replaced by win-XP over the next 3 months, because support for NT4 has been terminated. Another reason is increased use of laptops. The laptops currently use W2K (since NT & laptops don't mix well) and they want to move to a single client operating system.

He's being vague

[InternationalCow]

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.

MS don't get it

[PorscheDriver]

Muglia, a 16-year veteran of Microsoft, is tasked with building Longhorn Server, likely the most complex operating system ever designed

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.

Re:Migration.

[jawtheshark]

None... Networks using Windows NT4 are usually cut off from the internet. At least, at the client where I work it is that way. Want to go on the internet? Over there is a machine connected to the "Yellow Network", where you can surf all you want... This has the added effect of employees not wasting time on the internet because it is very "visbile" when you're surfing.