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.
...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.
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
Yes, they were.
I've also had good experiences with the ASA on a non-computing related matter (well, only tangentially related anyway). There were adverts for an online gambling site's poker service put up in Tube trains, with titles like "Sucker", "Gullible" and "Greedy", each one having an arrow pointing straight down at whoever was unfortunate enough to be sat on the seat beneath.
Which included me.
Unwilling to be called gullible purely for the sake of some slimy gambling joint grabbing more cash, I went via the ASA website and complained. Apparently I wasn't the only one, and it took just three weeks for the adverts to be withdrawn. A good result I think.
Oh, and yes - you'll have heard of these cretins should you be unlucky enough to see pop-up ads still. I'm certainly not giving them any free publicity by mentioning their name here though.
Cheers,
Ian
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.
That's an interesting hypothetical statement. Let's inject some actual data.
Windows not only costs more to purchase, in my experience it also costs for more to administer. I ran a huge farm of servers (hundreds of 4-CPU servers) that could run both NT and UNIX, and it took 4x as many sysadmin's per server to keep the _same_ servers running under NT than UNIX. On top of that, we could tune the UNIX environment to the application far better than NT, so we also got 2x the performance on the same app's under UNIX than NT (so we had to run the same app on 2x as many servers). This meant that in large scale production, we consistently (several years) measured NT as costing 8x as much as UNIX to run. Of course, you also have to factor in NT's relative instability as a server environment (try running ASP's with DLL's), but that hardly helps NT's case.
So let's rephrase your statement as: "There is more to cost than the software. My time is worth at least $50 an hour. And so if I have to muck around with a commercial piece of software more than free it can quickly become even more "expensive" than its free counterpart.
Would you take a commercial car if it cost $1,000 for gas and maintenance?"
There, that's better.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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 ?