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Ask Microsoft's Martin Taylor About Linux vs. Windows
Martin Taylor is Microsoft's global general manager of platform strategy, but he's best-known as the man the company trots out to refute claims of Linux superiority. Here are links to several interviews he's done in the past two years: vnunet.com; CMP; Computerworld; and one on Microsoft's own site. As usual, please submit one question per post. We'll present 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Mr. Taylor about 24 hours after this post appears, and we expect to publish his answers within the next week.
plz/thnx
Oh, a real question while I'm at it:
Of the Linux distributions you've extensively tested, assuming that you have so that your arguments are based on information rather than conjecture, which do you feel is the most desktop-ready?
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Wow, was that a loaded question or what. The two potential answers that you gave him are both bad. You're right, there is really no excuse, IE should have supported or renounced these things a long time ago.
All these serial number checks, dial-home schemes, registration schemes, digital "rights" management schemes, crippled 'starter' versions of windows, and now all sorts of anti-piracy checks whenever someone wants to patch ther Windows box - Microsoft does spend an awful lot of time and effort deliberately making sure their software doesn't work unless the customer jumps through the appropriate hoops.
Aren't you worried that this continual (and increasingly intrusive) process of deliberately breaking and/or crippling your own software is going to alienate some your customers and make them feel like criminals, particularly since the makers of the 'free software' operating systems that you're now competing against have no need of any of it and can concentrate all of their resources on trying to make their software work?
One of the myths about Windows is that there is a company behind it you can hold responsible for flaws that impact an organization. If you read the EULA of any MS product, even an update, it disclaims any responsibility whatever. They specifically avow that they are not fit for any purpose.
So what's up with that?
Open source licenses usually have the same thing, but those are generally free products. You guys have taken in a couple hundred billion. Plus, we can use the code as we like. So you can't claim any kind of equivalence.
Why does Microsoft regularly seem to decide to break with open standards and impliment their own version of them?
Silly rabbit
questions should be genuine. it shouldn't be used to prove a point, or lack of a point, or to push an agenda or to reinforce what we already know. nor should questions be used to try to push the answerer into a corner to "admit" something. we know it won't happen, it's self-serving and frankly, useless.
There are plenty of PHB's who are militant about MS products. They don't post on message boards and the like though. They stick to company memos and purchasing decisions.
People make a really big deal out of free. But if one product is better than the other -and I won't argue whether win. or linux is better- than why not pay for it. People pay more for a Porche than a Taurus because a Porche is better. If there was ever a car which was entirely free, people would still pay for the Porche.
The argument shouldn't be: Linux is better because it is free. It should be: Microsoft's higher price is not enough to justify the additional features one gets from it. If someone paid you a hundred dollars to use an operating system and it was really bad, most people probably wouldn't use it. The price, whether it be $-100, $0, $100, or $1000 is meaningless. However weighing that price to the given feature set is what is important.
Microsoft is completly capable of competing against Linux in the long term and writing them off as some ageing dinosaur is not accurate.
No I dont work for MS, Yes I'm running Linux on my laptop, m6811 fedora core 3... hot
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Microsoft's "Get the facts" campaing has been highly publicised in a wide variety of places, and frequently cites figures from studies that seem to show Windows at an advantage over Linux, yet on careful examination of these studies there are often methodological flaws in them.
I recall reading the details of one from the downloadable report on the Microsoft web site recently that compared the throughput of Windows + IIS to Linux + Apache for serving static web pages. The figures showed Windows in a clear lead, yet on closer examination it appears that the Windows installation had been thoroughly optimised (by, e.g., turning off the collection of last access information on the file system and increasing the default filesystem block size, see pages 30 & 33 of the document linked) whereas similar optimisations had not been applied to the Linux system for the test (with default configurations suggested by the distribution installer accepted for filesystem parameters, see pages 30 - 32 of the document).
How would you answer those who are concerned that by presenting these "independent" tests where the testers have followed precise instructions from Microsoft on how to optimise their products but have not (apparently) consulted Linux experts on how to optimise Linux systems as authoritative that you are unfairly distorting the truth and painting a poor picture of Linux? Is it just that you're doing your job the only way you can, because on a level playing field Linux would win? Or is the picture of these reports as unfair to Linux in some way wrong?
The TCO for Microsoft do not include anti-virus/spyware software, removal/cleanup efforts, and damage to productivity over the same period of time (i.e. the damage figures caused by the Blaster, etc are not factored into the TCO).
Since trojan/virus/spyware cause a news-worthy quoted figure of billions of dollars in damage/productivity, when will a study come out that properly reflects this risk as part of the TCO vs. a similar Linux solution?
I moved off windows in 1997 when a virus ate my master's thesis. AV vendor was no help. MS was no help. Basically nobody could help me. I had to retype 130+ pages from old printouts. I have yet to have a single problem on Linux, since I moved in 1997. No issuues with malware of any kind. Its been close to 7 years now. All my windows using friends have constant problems with malware - even several of the MCSE sys-admins have such problems. Why should I ever come back to windows?
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
Actually, the question is misleading. The .doc
file format is documented on MSDN[1], and is just
as open as PDF. The two also serve different needs.
PDF is effectively a page description language,
albeit one with some nice interactivity features
like forms and even animations (although few
people use them). The .doc format is intented
for editable documents, and stores various metadata along with the content. PDF is not and
doesn't.
But it does lead nicely to another file format related question. Last week, Bill Gates claimed:
Common file formats are the contract by which office applications can exchange data with each other. Given Bill's commitment to interoperability, when can we expect the Visio file format to be documented so that other diagram editors such as Dia of Kivio can interoperate with Visio, as Bill desires?
Similarly, the Exchange wire protocol is the contract by which mail clients communicate and exchange data with the MS Exchange mail server. I take it that we can look forward to documentation for that, too, so that the myriad email clients in use today can talk to an Exchange server?
Another example would be the W3C standards, the contract by which a web developer sends markup information to an end user for viewing in a browser. The rest of the world is happily using CSS to provide rich presentation of information to end users. Yet as developers, we are forced to break that contract because Microsoft's IE browser doesn't honour the contract, and our web sites don't display in the intended manner. Will MS commit to bringing IE up to scratch so that it interoperates with the rest of the world?
Will MS start making versions of Word that use standard UTF-8 character encoding, rather than a Microsoft specific one that produces output that doesn't interoperate with non-Microsoft platforms (and even, as we found out this week, with newer versions of IE, which correctly ignore the MS character set!)
Or was he merely referring to making Microsoft applications interoperable with each other, a move which reduces customer choice, and prevents them from picking the best solution available for the task because it may not interoperate correctly with existing Microsoft products?
[1] At least, it was. I don't know if that documentation has been kept up to date with the latest versions of .doc
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
In your October 2004 interview with VNUnet.com you deny that Microsoft must compete with Linux in your operating systems, going so far as to say that 'nothing could be further from the truth.' With this in mind, why does Microsoft not aid in the development of API's designed to enable Linux-based operating systems to run Microsoft applications? If the Linux community and Microsoft are not competitors, as you claim, it seems to follow that collaboration on such projects as Wine (Win32) and Cedega (DirectX) would do nothing but benefit the community overall, and do much for future interoperability.
We are a medium sized school with approximately 250 windows 2000 or XP workstations (OEM licensing + office XP) and 100 or so staff and student laptops.
We're looking at migrating off our aging NT servers to new backend logon and file servers. We already have several linux 'edge' or special purpose servers; firewalls, backup, web, email, pxe+dhcp, dns etc, and we have a decent amount of in-house experience in both windows and linux.
Given our desktops must remain on windows because of office and windows-only education software we priced up both windows server 2003 and linux replacements. Sticking to the same hardware for both costings, we came to some worrying conclusions.
Redhat Enterprise ES would set us back £700 a server, with free client access and 3 years of upgrades, and we've also got the option of a completely free system like debian. We'd use samba+ldap to largely replicate our existing setup, but with beefier hardware and security updates.
Windows 2003, at £30 a seat for new Client Access Licences, would set us back nearly £22,000 for current and next year projected licence requirements, just for authentication and file sharing, with extra costs in the thousands for every extra server we might add later.
Given that implementation will be done in-house regardless of our chosen solution, I'd like to know if:
a) I'm missing something obvious with regards the licensing costs for windows server 2003?
b) If I'm not, whether you expect such a large mismatch on up-front costs to seriously impact on Microsoft's server business in the education and other cash-strapped areas?
Even assuming the windows implementation is more efficient and quicker to deploy in itself, the linux system would be far simpler to integrate our existing single-purpose servers with (direct access to the ldap user database, for a start). With the CAL licencing savings alone, we could buy an extra server and 20 workstations.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Instead of fighting Linux, Java, etc., Microsoft should embrace them. Instead of trying to dictate what the customer uses, foloow their lead.
Face it - Microsoft will never kill Linux. But, there's potentially a lot of money to be made supporting it. Imagine a Microsoft bundle of Linux - with Microsoft support. You'd get a lot of business you'll never see otherwise.
Then, consider the concept of cross-platform software. There's really no reason why Word isn't available on more platforms than just Windows and OS X - why not Linux as well? If you write your core software platform-neutral and wrapper the UI nicely, you'd gain market share for very little extra costs.
If Microsoft was more open to this sort of thing, I think people would be as hostile to the company. Right now, every thing you guys do is so tighly bound to Windows you alienate many folks who otherwise might be customers.
I personally don't like Microsoft or Windows - until I got my new box with hyperthreading, it was possible to a single program to lock up the box by maxing out the CPU, and I'm not impressed with the stability or security - but I DO have a Microsoft keyboard - because it's the best I've ever used.
People WILL buy a product if it's simply the best. But if it's shoved on them as a result of market monopoly (and the quality is only moderate), they'll look elsewhere.