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Microsoft Found Guilty of Misleading Advertising

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the everybody-play-nicely dept.

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."

7 of 608 comments (clear)

  1. What about back across the pond? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What's stopping your guys complaining to your government agencies?

  2. independent research? by Lostie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:independent research? by kfg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      . . .always come out in favour for Microsoft.

      Actually, this isn't true. What happens is that when a private party funds "research" such as this it's a work for hire, the funding party owns the results and the researcher is bound and gagged by an NDA.

      When the results don't come out as they like, which is fairly common, they simply don't publish those results.

      It's pretty easy for me to prove that I can always flip a coin to land heads if each flip is taken to be an independant test and I only publish the tests that came up heads.

      KFG

  3. No real surprises by farnz · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Having seen the advert, I'm not surprised they got told off; the gist of it was that Linux had to be worse than Windows, since Windows on a dual Xeon was as fast as Linux on an S/390 mainframe, but at 1/10th the cost.

    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.
  4. Re:Marketing slime... by Halo- · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Unfortunately it wouldn't do too well on the capabilities side of the equation. To be fair Microsoft does somewhat have a point as IBM, one of the foremost advocates of Linux, is pushing the virtual-Linux-on-a-mainframe concept, and a lot of people are buying. It seems that Microsoft was tageting that competitor rather than Linux-running-on-obsoleted-developer-PC.

    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...)
  5. Microsoft had a valid point by ajs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  6. I complained to OSDN by mpcooke3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.