Slashdot Mirror
Report From "Get The Facts"
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."
Microsoft believes in free software too. Ever use Internet Explorer and see how fast all the free software shows up on your computer?
making out that Linux isn't free
This is one of the few ways that Linux will ever be associated with "making out"...
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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.
Even worse, does Airbus (or Boeing for that matter) manufacture every single of a million parts in a plane themselves?
Hell no! Certainly not. There's an abundance of suppliers supplying parts for a plane, from the altimeter to the leather chairs in first class.
You don't even have to go so far as to look at the airplane industry. Car manufacturers make only a miniscule percentage of the components themsleves. The rest is manufactured and delivered by suppliers.
Otherwise the cost for a car would be comparatively so outrageously high like the cost for some uh! software...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
"Linux training costs were 15% higher on average"
Well that's because training to fix windows is "just hit reset"
Haha... so Microsoft's strategy of pushing the idea that Linux has an equal or greater TCO than Windows basically ignores the fact that Linux is free and that any businesses wanting to use it will naturally go for the most expensive possible distribution (i.e RedHat uber deluxe professional platinum addition for business).
Perhaps if they faced the "facts", their study might be worth something.
And as for the comparison of Linux to a DOS prompt... Microsoft seems to think that adding a huge bloated GUI to a server OS is going to improve things. Well, I say that any half-decent system administrator should be able to do his job completely from a command-line interface and should not need a GUI.
View source on the page. They've part commented out. Wonder why they did that.
The overall tone of this event makes it fairly clear as to Microsoft's anti-Linux strategy.
:P)
1.Claim that linux isn't free.
2.Pretend that Shared source is the same as Open Source
3.Make a big deal about the migration costs of moving to Linux
4.Use the forrester report to claim that Linux is insecure
5.Belittle the quality of the toolset available on Linux
Point 1 and 2 I won't dignify with a reply.
On Point 3 - Yes, there are migration costs... but that is a dumb argument. There is ALWAYS a migration cost when upgrading (horse and buggy to car - airtravel - spacetravel etc)
4. Yes, linux can be insecure ---- so can windows and anything else (except OpenBSD!!
5. On this point, I dont' care who says what - Microsoft has better (and I mean this in all respects) tools available for Rapid development.
First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
I'd say that we were at Stage 3 now, we were at Stage 2 last year and the year before.
Things are looking up!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Microsoft Starts its "Get The Facts" Campaign
So I sat with about 150 other "technical decision makers" in a very plush hotel in Holborn while representatives from Microsoft tried their best to convince me that I should not be considering moving to Linux. To run the discussion Microsoft had employed a fake-tan horror who had clearly escaped from daytime TV. He was by turns chummy and condescending. However being a reasonable man I will not hold Microsoft responsible for his failings.
First up was Phillip Dawson who leads Linux research for analysts Meta Group. He quoted heavily from a Meta analysis which shows that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for linux and windows is comparable. This study has been widely reported in IT press but I can't for the life of me find a link to the original. He made some interesting points about where the datacentre is going to be in a few years. His basic thrust was that everyone is moving from proprietary Unix with its expensive platforms to Windows or Linux on x86 platforms and that it this hardware move, rather than linux versus windows, that will drive all the cost savings. Dawson believes that in a few years the only place we will see proprietary Unix is in very large enterprise databases.
After a promising start, Dawson then got into the territory of why Windows makes more sense for enterprises than Linux. He introduced what was to become a running theme for seminar, Linux is not free. It turns out that the TCO statements made earlier were based on the licensing costs of SuSE professional and Red Hat Enterprise versus Windows. They had refused to consider that people might run a business on something that they could download free from the Internet. Later in the Q and A session Dawson got quite aggravated when people pointed out to him that many Linux-based businesses run quite happily on free linux (this was shouted by the scruffy-looking Debian hackers in the back). I can only assume that businesses that are brave enough to save thousands of pounds per unit by moving away from expensive hardware platforms are meant not to care that they can save another couple of hundred pounds on Microsoft licence fees. Later in the presentation he said "Don't compare to the free downloads. They are not free". Precisely what he meant by this escapes me.
One area the Meta study didn't look at was Linux on the desktop. Phil claimed that linux was not ready for the desktop because it lacked administrative tools. He was carrying on in a similar vein when he said "Management tools on Linux are nearly as good as a DOS prompt".
Nick Barley, business and Marketing Director for Microsoft UK took to the stage to baffle us with market-speak. There was lots of talk about strategy and leveraging which I didn't follow. He talked a bit about Microsoft's shared-source program and tried his hardest to make it sound like open-source, mainly by refusing to say Open-source and talking about shared-source instead. Continuing in Phillip Dawson's footsteps he repeated the mantra "Linux is not free" several times. Although he was at his best when talking about business models amongst Linux distributors claiming that "Linux is moving to the same model that Microsoft has been using".
My absolute favourite part of the talk was when Barley started to extol the virtues of Windows because everything in it was made by one manufacturer. A fair point which would have been well taken had he not gone on to draw an idiotic analogy. He asked us to imagine an aeroplane where different components were made by different companies. Apparently he's never heard of Airbus.
Next up was Nick McGrath head of platform strategy for Microsoft UK. The main bulk of his talk was taken up by a demonstration of a document sharing system based on Microsoft Sharepoint. Very boring for those of us running heterogeneous systems that Sharepoint will not run on. McGrath was much more technically clued up than Barley, and seemed to be aware that the audience was not entirely on his side. He made me
Has anyone else noticed that in the metagroup TCO analysis, they compare a windows server running on a two processor intel machine, and a linux server running on (one or two - can't remember) MAINFRAME processors.
I mean - cm'on, perhaps they should have pitted a walmart PC with windows installed vs Linux running on a Cray server... The TCO takes into account the entire purchase of hardware, and in the Mainframe case - you probably looking at 16 processor machine to begin with, which kind'a spikes the price up...
But - the graph looks very convincing - and isn't it what it's all about?
Just a little food for thought...
In the glossy brochure they give out at the event they have a file of 'case studies'. Several are from organisations (such as Newham Borough Council) who were about to transition to Open Source but were then bought off^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H convinced that, in fact, sticking with Windows would cost them less(!).
:)
The truth is they are terrified. They've got wind of what's on its way over here in the UK.
Relax, don't panic. Wait and see what us Brits have got coming for MS over the next few months
I was at the Edinburgh event last week which was the 2nd event in their roadshow.
Here's some advice for people who'll be at their next two events (Manchester this week I think, and Wales the week after (Newport, IIRC)):
- Plan in your coffee break questions to ask them (be careful about providing them with the question on paper as they reworded mine - try and ask it in person at the end).
- Ask more about IBM involvement in Linux, they tried to claim that IBM were trying to lock people in to Linux, try and provide counter examples as to how it'd be easier to escape an IBM stranglehold than an MS one.
- They cite interoperability as one of Microsoft's main aims, people mentioned the office file formats and recent patents, but they hedged around the question, someone needs to seriously challenge them on this at the event.
- Talk to the other delegates in clear concise language why you think Linux should be considered as a serious option. Don't sound like a zealot and accept there's many times when Windows would be more suitable than Linux.
- Point out to people that open source doesn't always mean Linux, in fact doesn't always mean changing an OS at all. There's some quality open source software for Windows - promote Firefox and OpenOffice as examples
any businesses wanting to use it will naturally go for the most expensive possible distribution (i.e RedHat uber deluxe professional platinum addition for business).
/. Sadly many who are called sys admins don't really know a whole lot.
Many companies like the one I work for require you to be able to get a service contract for any software. So, to use Linux they have to be able to get a service contract. That's why they go for those expensive ones. They have the service.
Well, I say that any half-decent system administrator should be able to do his job completely from a command-line interface and should not need a GUI.
You're figureing on half decent sys admins. Many of the ones I know can't do anyting outside the GUI. And they don't even have half of an understanding of what is really going on. Some have never even herd of
Evolution or ID?
I don't understand a few things about this. Why do people believe this type of thing when Microsoft brings absolutely *NO* proof of any of these claims? Can any of this be considered slander? They're trying to throw mud on Linux's image with no real proof.
And why did this guy sit through this entire "seminar" in the first place?
Really, Well, I just installed mandrake 10 this weekend to replace w2k on an old pc. My first linux. And it was, free.
I downloaded it, burned it, and installed. I had minimal help and everything went very smoothly.
Er, right.
"linux ISNT free?" "really? heres 10 free copies of mandrake right now." "youll have to pay to support it." "ah, then dont you mean linux SUPPORT isnt free? Is windows support free?" *insert adhominem attack they are trained to do here*
I imagine the best thing you can do at these is hand out free linux install cds, and allow people to make the choice for themselves.
Again, mandrake 10 was SUPRISINGLY easy to get working.
no
Essentially Coke was the biggest cola company on the block, until they acknowledged Pepsi as a competitor.
You say this as if they aren't still the biggest on the block. Coke is still (as it has always been) well ahead of Pepsi in both global market share and global market value. Their stock price is higher, and they still ship many more units / yaar then Pepsi. Sure Pepsi may have more flashy ads in the US, but that doesn't mean squat to their international presence. Just do a Google on the cola wars.
This said, if Linux ever got to the point that it was as much of a competitor to MS as Pepsi is to Coke, I'd be damn happy.
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.
I jumped in to the "Desktop Linux Consortium" back in the Feb 2003 to offer some thoughts about direction for the forming DLC and the linux desktop in general. If you have any interest in what I said back then:
l c-discuss/2003-February/000002.html
http://www.desktoplinuxconsortium.org/pipermail/d
I think that the crucial missing application and management pieces are staring us all right in the face. It is not enough to have an easy install. It's not enough to have a slick desktop and functional apps. Those are important, certainly, but if we are really doing well at them, why hasn't the momentum shifted?
I've worked IT for fifteen years and the number of systems I've imaged with their OS and software loads dwarfs by 100 to 1 the number of times I've used any OS installer, even if you count the last five years of Install Parties at the Melbourne Florida LUG! The things most developers and non-corporate users think are important don't apply to corporate IT like people outside of IT would think.
The typical larger IT department has to deal with things like corporate software policies, locking user account profiles, automated application and operating system patches/updates and remote helpdesk. How can I enforce the corporate software policy against instant messengers when every distro except debian bundles all the stock KDE applications (including instant messenger apps) in a few giant RPMs? KDE 3.2 will be doing more profile locking features, but what about applications that don't use the KDE libs? What about Gnome?
I know people point to things like Red Carpet and the Red Hat Network for updates (still not 100% in my opinion), but I think corporations will need to be able to build or rebuild apps with different attributes or patches for distribution to corporate clients. SUSE is using 'autobuild' internally and Red Hat wants you to buy a Red Hat Network Proxy, but again, no-one other than Debian provides access to the build architecture to be able to modify certain stock bundled apps like removing parts from larger RPM's like KDE.
Remote helpdesk and other IT-friendly features are available in most distributions at this point, but they aren't really bundled and configured for that role in the context of the distribution. This needs work and attention. VNC is great, but a distro focusing on corporate desktops needs to have that puppy configured for easy remote desktop support by default.
I've spoken at LinuxWorld and other conferences, but every time I try to submit a topic that addresses some of these kinds of issues, I hear crickets and we get 10 more 'How to install Samba' sessions. We need a focus on what all the "Ticket System Cowboys" know about desktop deployments before some of the spectacular Linux desktop announcements turn into craptastic failures.
Just my $0.02.
DaGoodBoy
My God! It's full of Voids!
Why shall I believe any of them?
Their software, out of the box, runs Sobig, Bagel and Blaster as well as it does IE or Office.
A large part of the cost of administering desktops in a business environment is repairing the damage done by users who have been given excessive system privileges because their applications require them to have them. Linux/Unix apps, as a general rule, don't do that. As a result, it is possible to lock a n*x box down to the point that a user can still do his/her job but he/she cannot wreak havoc on the machine or the network. When the user can only install "goodies in his or her $HOME where they also store their precious data, and pr0n^W other irreplaceable information, they are MUCH more careful about what they click "OK" on. This reduces TCO dramatically.
Just my USD0.02
utter rubbish
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)).
But despite their apparent terror, they've still managed to maintain their market dominance. I don't really think Microsoft is as scared as some Slashdotters would make themselves believe they are. Show me where Linux has taken a significant bite out of Microsoft; then you might have a case.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
15% higher. Not a chance
If I took a Unix course back in 1989 (before Linux even had emerged) most of what I learnded then would still be somewhat useful in Linux of today. How much would 15 years old windows knowledge help me in manageing windows XP of today. Not much I think. Most likely I would have to have more frequent retraining if I run windows.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
ICAT classified 67% of Microsoft's vulnerabilities as high severity, placing Microsoft dead last among the platform maintainers by this metric.
I'm one of the lucky ones who successfully made the transition away from Windows to Linux. What was my TCO? I'd say I've spent around $300. That includes the cost of books (most of which were of less help than I hoped), and a copy of Lycoris and its Productivity Pak. (It's a nice distro, but it feels constraining.) Ultimately I became a Mandrake user, and it is installed on all three of my PC's.
Had I stuck with using MS Windows, I would still have spent about $300, and two of my PC's would not be "Kosher" according to MS's EULA. Of course if I were to get "picky" I could toss on the cost of all the additional software (Norton's, Office, etc...) and watch the TCO plow through the roof, but then, I don't want to stoop that low.
I just wish MS, and even some Linux zealots out there would get it through their heads: There are places to use MS Windows, places to use Linux, and even places where either will do nicely. (OK, I'll even include Mac's as having a place as well...)
But to make broad claims that draw illogical conclusions based on a pile of inequitable features-- Well, it's just not very professional, and I'm once again disappointed in Microsoft.
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 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.
who doesn't know of the socket handle leak that MS can't fix because otherwise they'd break 1000's of apps
My sympathy levels for Microsoft engineers skyrocketted after reading this and this, detailing the horrors they have to deal with in the name of compatability.