Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Found Guilty of Misleading Advertising
gtoomey writes "The UK Advertising Standards Authority has upheld complaints that Microsoft misled consumers by running advertisements claiming Linux is 10 times more expensive than Windows. The print advertisements used "independent research" to compare the cost of Linux on an expensive mainframe to Windows on a PC."
What's stopping your guys complaining to your government agencies?
It's interesting that the ASA slapped Microsoft on the wrists for running the comparison on both different HARDWARE and software.
They should have also enquired into this "independent research" - Microsoft has a history of funding "independant researchers" itself, which coincidentally always come out in favour for Microsoft.
Clearly, when you compare the operating cost of a mainframe to the operating cost of a PC, it doesn't matter what OS you put on either system, the mainframe is going to cost more to own.
The research may have been conducted indepenently and fairly, but the conclusion it came to should have surprised nobody because the test they were running didn't put the two operating systems on a level playing field in the first place.
Try running both OSes on identical hardware and then see what kind of results you get...
If you didn't read the website the advert pointed you at very carefully, you would be led to believe that Linux needed much more expensive hardware than Windows to even match capabilities; in fact, the study made no such claims.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
The US has much more liberal standards for what we allow advertisers to get away with. To get in trouble here, your ad has to contain "false" information, over there, it's a much weaker standard of being "misleading"... which is to say the information in the ad can be all true, but if an average reader will use your information to reach a false conclusion you're still in trouble there but not here.
:)
Silly First Amendment coming back to bite us when in the hands of a megacorp again...
...and thinking, how much more stupid can it be? I saw the ad in a publication aimed at IT professionals (e-week, I think). Now granted, I know a lot of CIOs and other IT executive types might see it, but at least with the magazine I saw it in, I would think the target base would have enough tech savvy to know that a mainframe is going to cost more to run than a dual-xeon system.
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!
I used to work in an advertising company. Oddly, the one that held the Microsoft account in 1995, when MS released Windows 95.
At that time, there were a few 'jinks' planned for the release that were not, strictly speaking, legal.
They knew that they'd get their wrists slapped, perhaps fined heavily.
The company take on it? They knew they may get caught up for it, and slapped hard. But these jinks would get the 'message' across in a spectacular way.
Nobody looked too hard at the slapdown and retractions, because they simply avoided the limelight. They had to look apologetic to the right people in private, and it was all forgotten.
But people at large simply remembered the original advertising stunt.
In this, it's the same thing again. They knew they'd be held up by the ASA, and torn down a strip, and forced to stop the advertisement.
However, they also know that the tech-unsure IT Managers and CIOs and so on will probably see it, and start saying "See, this Linux thing isn't so cheap after all! Stay with MS".
Advertising like that is meant to stay in the head along with the words 'survey' and masquerade as fact, so that in a future discussion that's on the subject, they won't say "I saw an advert that said Linux is more expensive than Windows", they'll say "I saw a SURVEY that showed how windows was cheaper to run than Linux".
Damage already done. Although the lie has been caught it's already spread, masquerading as fact.
They've earned their money, MS will pay any required fines (they've probably already been built into the pitch before it was released), and MS will be smiling all the way as the flung mud sticks, as it always does.
weren't they also the ones that slammed Apple for claiming the g5 was the fastest personal computer on earth?
Monstar L
Douglas Adams described the Vogons as "not being above bribery and corruption in the same way that the sea is not above the clouds" (something like that - I'm working from memory). For some odd reason that phrase popped into my head as I read the article.
Another interesting bit:
"...The results showed that IBM z900 mainframe running Linux is much less capable and vastly more expensive than Windows Server 2003 as a platform for server consolidation.*" The ASA said the asterisk linked to a footnote that said: "Results may vary outside the United States".
I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean: is Linux less capable in Abu Dhabi than it is in the US? Are the results are reversed in the southern hemisphere? One might think that - if the study were conducted properly (big if) - the figures would remain proportional even after pricing for markets and conversion of currency (exchange rates).
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
advertisers calculate ~like this :
a lot of people are too lazy to do their own reserch
a lot of people are too dumb to do their own reserch
about the remained ~5%, we don't care
and the obvious conclusion - it don' matter what crap you tell them, make it sound nice and they'll buy
as about stigmatising MS for this .. i don' wanna say they are the nicest company, but ANY big company that ever did advertising, had at least one similar campaign
or think about this sample AFAIR, Carlsberg ran a spot saying "Carlsberg - probably the best beer in the world"
think about the uproar after a "Windows - probably the best OS in the world"
advertising is the real bad-guy here, not MS ... advertising takes away your freedom of choice by exploiting your lazyness or dumbness ... and they do it so good, most of people even enjoy it!
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Oh I entirely and completely agree that it is misleading - what they compared wasn't Linux versus Windows, it was Linux-as-IBM-would-have-you-have-it versus Windows which is quite a different beast altogether.
I have also been watching the WinXP-SP2 saga play out and it just seems like "business as usual" to me. I'm sure they will get it right in the end - just in time to start the whole process all over again with "LongHaul" - opps sorry, Longhorn.
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
considering my home server running windows cost $100 for the windows copy, and my linux server cost $0 for the software, hmm, I wonder whats cheaper
Yeah, but how many virtual Linux machines can one z/OS mainframe run at once? (I beleive that even the mid-range boxes can run thousands without noticable impact) How many copies of Windows can you run simulatanously on a development PC? (I guess two or three if you go the VMWare route, but that drive cost up, and the performace would be the sux0r)
So if I was say, a webhosting company which gave out "full root access accounts" (or their Windows equiv) I suspect the price difference between a z/OS mainframe running a thousand Linux LPARs vs. a room full of a thousand commodity PC's running Windows would be pretty hard to calculate. There are so many factors. For example:
You've got one very expensive , but bulletproof box vs. 1000 cheap, but all-too-failable PCs. If the mainframe never croaks, you've saved money. But some fluke electrical event fries the mainframe, you're totally fsck'ed. I'm not even gonna try to guess at the difference in electrical and facilities costs because I don't know crap about the costs of either option, but I suspect they both would be interesting numbers. (1000 PC's is a lot of heat and electricity, but a z/OS prolly needs special power and the environment needs to be controlled as well...)The original reason for the research was to counter IBM's claims that you could reduce your TCO more by converting to Linux on a mainframe than to Windows on PC farms.
BOTH OF THEM WERE CORRECT.
In the IBM case, they were looking at it from the point of view that you already had mainframes, and you wanted to make them cheaper to maintain and keep up with modern software trends. They were correct.
In the Microsoft case, they were analyzing what it would take to convert over to mainframes or start from scratch. They were correct.
Where MS went horribly, horribly wrong was when their marketing folks took this, perfectly reasonable, research and referenced it in ads to the general computing community without any indication that it was a comparison relevant only to a particular niche market!
MS did some good research here, but the applied it unethically. Let's be clear on what we're coming down on them for!
When I saw these TCO ads running on slashdot I complained to OSDN. They didn't deny the ads were misleading but didn't seem to want to stop running them. Their argument basically revolved around the fact that slashdot users wouldn't take the ads seriously anyway.
I stated at the time that I thought they would be in breach of UK advertising law.
You're joking right?
Perhaps a little more than a year ago, I personally made the assertion that Linux is great...even unmatched on the server side, especially for the cost involved but even without costs considered, I think Linux does an amazingly good job. But I also said Liunx is not ready for the desktop as I found it slow, unstable and barely usable.
What has changed? I have better hardware though that shouldn't have been the difference. We have newer X releases, new Open Office releases, GNOME wasn't even 2.0 at the time was it?
In any case, what has changed is largely my lazy ass. One day I just decided it was time to learn to use the thing as more than a server. And without many failures (I have this little digital camera for which no Linux support exists), I haven't run into any task I couldn't complete with satisfaction under (currently) Fedora Core 2. (please, I know there are other distros and KDE "Kicks De Ess!" and all that, but I'm comfortable with GNOME and FC2)
My point here is that at this point in time, I truly feel it's ready for prime time. More than that, I feel it's NEEDED prime time. The net has been getting a lot of attention for being unsafe for machines with a Microsoft OS. There are too many holes to plug even for experts in the field so I cannot imagine how helpless end users feel (though from my view they seem like helpless children getting f*cked up the ass and don't yet realize that this is immoral and wrong.)
The only thing that needs to change at this point in time are the minds of users.
But like the adoption of USB technology, it's a kind of chicken-egg thing. And ultimately, it was the makers of hardware that brought realization of the potential of USB. I suspect it will again be manufacturers (of PCs this time) that will bring realization of Linux's potential on the desktop.
It's ready. It's just a matter of whether we can get the hardware people out there to support Linux better.
I don't see how you can claim they "nailed" Apple several times when a) there's only one case and b) two out of three of the complaints were rejected: The G5 was the world's first 64 bit personal computer and the first to break the 4GB memory limit.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Personally, I don't like being marketed at myself. Unfortunately out in the real world, your competitor starts throwing mud and some starts to stick - fairly or unfairly. What are you going to do? Sit back and watch your market share shrink, smug in the knowledge that you are doing the right thing? Or do you retaliate - which leads into a spiral of fudged numbers and statistics and general confusion. Yes I know which I would prefer, but lets be real here. Companies, whether global domination types like Microsoft or mom and pops ice cream emporium - here's the shocker - HAVE TO MAKE A PROFIT. Deal with it ladies.
Amusingly enough (IIRC), political advertising is exempt from ASA rules - i.e. they ARE allowed to lie.
The very fact that my post was modded +5, Insightful gives insight on how most slashdoters see politics. And somehow I don't think this is a phenomenon limited to the US.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Halo: I'm guessing you haven't done much enterprise-level computing. That same "freak electrical event" could fry 1000's of PCs too (I assume it's something that blows past your PDU-supplied redundant power and line conditioning... right?? I mean, that could happen...)
If that's the case, I'd rather restore -one- system at my DR site than 100, or 500, or whatever.
Anyone reminded of the Quiznos commercials? "The only way for the other guys to win...is to cheat."
I mean, best of luck to the British for trying their best to keep advertisers honest. It's really the right attitude to have, but before pouring this much resources into this issue why not step back and think: it's freakin' advertising, fer fuck's sake! What do you expect? Hype and exaggeration are the bread-and-butter of marketing. They need to get your attention in a 20-second spot or a half-page ad or whatever. If they don't use half-naked women, they're going to make claims that cause you to do a double-take (although I think the half-naked women in computing ads concept has not yet been fully explored... hint, hint, Apple and Microsoft!)
If you're really so thick-headed that you need someone else to point this out to you, that Linux may not be more expensive because a competitor's ad claims it, or that the G5 may not necessarily be the world's fastest PC, then you've got much bigger personal issues to deal with.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
That actually IS part of the stupid "get the facts straight" campaign. What this and other silly comparisons always conveniently leave out is the fact that a good Linux admin can handle 50-100 boxes (more in an identical cluster situation), whereas a good windows admin can handle 20-30 boxes.
How about some math:
(these salaries are made up and meant to illustrate that even if your Linux admin makes DOUBLE what your Windows admins make, it's still a better deal.)
Linux admin: $80K, Win admin: $40K
30 machines: Linux $80K, Win $40K
30-100: Linux $80K, Win $160K
100-200: Linux $160K, Win: $280K
So now let's try it with closer to real figures:
Linux admin: $50K, Win admin: $45K
30 boxes: Linux $50K, Win $45K
30-100: Linux $50K, Win $180K
100-200: Linux $100K, Win $315
If Windows admins are in fact paid less, Windows can only come out ahead in small operations. Furthermore, the closer Win and Linux admin salaries are, the better the savings are in a large operation when you go with Linux.
Also as an admin, if you see that even Microsoft is saying that Linux admins make more money, why would you waste your time learning their system? Show me the MONEY!