Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Report From "Get The Facts"

Posted by Hemos on from the continue-the-update dept.

Richard W.M. Jones writes "Huw Lynes wrote an interesting report from Microsoft's "Get The Facts" show in London (earlier Slashdot story). Along with the report he provides some analysis of their apparent strategy, which includes equating "Shared Source" with "Open Source" and making out that Linux isn't free."

8 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. Spin Doctors by mfh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article: He quoted heavily from a Meta analysis which shows that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for linux and windows is comparable.

    Microsoft must be suffering if they are going at Open Source head on. I remember taking an advertising class once, and we studied the Coke/Pepsi Cola War. Essentially Coke was the biggest cola company on the block, until they acknowledged Pepsi as a competitor. By doing so, Coke gave Pepsi the kind of credit they needed to gain significant market share, and obtain lucrative endorsement celebrities, who may not have supported Pepsi if Coke had held the "one true cola" stance and simply ignored Pepsi.

    The bottom line is that Microsoft is taking a page from Coke, and they are going to lose out bigtime in doing so, because their math is voodoo math, and they charge exorbitant license fees, so their cost of usage will always be much much higher than Open Source, no matter which spindoctor tries to make it look and taste differently than it is.

    --
    The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
  2. Part of the page commented out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    View source on the page. They've part commented out. Wonder why they did that.

    1. Re:Part of the page commented out by miltimj · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That's because those two headlines they comment out say the following:

      A 2002 Microsoft-sponsored study of total costs of ownership over five years for working corporate infrastructure in North America shows that lower staffing expenses are a large part of an 11-22% cost advantage for Windows.

      Microsoft-sponsored benchmarks prove that multiple Windows Web servers perform better than a Linux mainframe acting as a Web server consolidator. An independent review by Meta verified the integrity of the results.

      (emphasis mine)

      Apparently the PR slamming they're taking for those studies made them (at least temporarily) remove them from the site...

      --
      "Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
  3. It's a worse analogy than that... by ohad_l · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsoft certainly does not make all of the components in a running Windows system. First of all, I'm pretty sure that most people running Windows are not running any Microsoft hardware except for perhaps a mouse, keyboard, and/or gaming peripheral. So your setup is not 100%-microsoft - it's not even close if you take hardware into account. It gets a lot closer when you look at macs, but nowadays even they use (modified) versions of commodity hardware, such as nVidia and ATI graphics cards. Also, last time I checked, commodity hardware was a good thing, seeing as it drives competition over price and quality. Now, as for your software department - just take a look at drivers. If you're using an nVidia or ATI card, you are probably using their drivers. Microsoft, as far as I know, did NOT write those, and yet they are an integral part of the system (so integral, as a matter of fact, that nVidia drivers have been known to bring X on Linux to a screeching halt). Also, if I am not mistaken, Windows uses BSD's TCP/IP stack. True, today the code is maintained by Microsoft coders, but I can't imagine them having needed to completely overhaul it - they are using a modified version of a product (piece of code) that was manufactured (written) by someone else. And last but not least, a major factor keeping people on Windows is software that is written for it, which they can't do without or find a replacement for which runs on their target OS. Guess what? Most of that software isn't written by Microsoft either. Many people swear by Adobe Photoshop, and don't switch to Linux because they find The Gimp inadequate. Others want to play their favorite computer games, which simply do not work [well] on Linux. And even if, say, their favorite computer game is Microsoft Flight Simulator or Microsoft's Age of Empires - yep, that's right. Microsoft didn't make those. They just bought them. A large, complex product is best manufactured by multiple specialty manufacturers which adhere to well-known standards. F/OSS supporters know this. Microsoft knows this as well.

    --
    If it weren't for fog, the world would run at a really crappy framerate.
  4. Re:Unfair comparisons... of course they're going t by dossen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Personally, I'd reverse the comparison and say the DOS prompt is "almost as good as a Unix shell."

    Then you would, IMHO, be lying. The DOS prompt has never been even close to a match to a proper Unix shell. Even running bash with the full gnu toolchain in a Windows XP cmd.exe prompt (thankyou cygwin) is still much worse than using the real thing (even their mouse selection stuff is retarded. OK they cannot have X's nice selection style cut'n'paste, but at least make the default selection tool line oriented, rather than block (I cannot remember even once needing the kind of selection you get in cmd.exe, if your text is not neatly on one line)).

  5. Most important Quote from the Forrester report by rk_nh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ICAT classified 67% of Microsoft's vulnerabilities as high severity, placing Microsoft dead last among the platform maintainers by this metric.

  6. Well, it is a sales pitch... by gillbates · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm kind of heartened by it, as a matter of fact.

    What this shows, more than anything, is that Microsoft clearly doesn't understand the enterprise market. What they fail to recognize is this:

    • Microsoft believes that as long as they supply patches, they've done their job. They consistently use the "unpatched machine" defense to explain the wave of machines hit by the latest worm or virus, seemingly unaware that an enterprise datacenter cannot be taken offline to apply patches. Even could downtime be found, a patch would first have to be tested, and only then applied to a production machine. A patch that breaks vital software won't ever get applied to a production machine.
    • Microsoft's response has typically been "reboot and reinstall" when a system becomes corrupted or crashes. This is completely unacceptable for an enterprise datacenter - a company cannot afford even a single hour of downtime during peak hours. Microsoft seemingly cannot grasp this key concept.
    • Corporations need a vendor who can gaurantee the reliability and uptime of their software. Microsoft does neither, but their competition does.
    • When figuring TCO, Microsoft conveniently forgets the cost of installing patches, and cleaning up after viruses and worms. This factor alone increases the TCO of Windows by at least an order of magnitude.

    Microsoft just doesn't get it. Corporations could care less about streaming video and DirectX. And they aren't fooled by marketing hype - Microsoft can say all they want about "trustworthy computing", but sysadmins know better.

    --
    The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
  7. Re:Free Software by bornholtz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just pointed IE at a non-existing proxy server (10.0.0.1). Firefox can then be set up to either use my real proxy (Squid on Linux so I can track what sites my kids visit) or letFirefox use no proxy if you don't have one.

    Then IE never comes back and Firefox is nice and snappy.

    --
    -- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.