Slashdot Mirror
Yankee Group Slams Linux 'Extremists'
AvatarofVirgo wrote in to mention an article running on ZDNet in which the consulting firm The Yankee Group goes after folks in the Linux community who have been questioning their objectivity. From the article: "Laura DiDio, an analyst at the Yankee Group who has been at the receiving end of much of the criticism from Linux advocates, claimed the radical elements of the community could damage the reputation of open source software."
She's a prime example of how pro microsoft extremism in the course of her job has decimated her credibility. Her. O'Gara ( for SCO). Enderle. No one believes them any more.
Learn your lessons well.
You say
This statement was dismissed too quickly by Ziff-Davis:
The fact is that major analyst firms earn their revenue in two ways:
1. Selling reports and consulting services to customers (IT businesses in this example) that describe the market, the vendors, and who's doing what.
2. Selling consulting services back to the vendors to help them position their product for various markets.
It's tough for the analyst firms to remain objective because sometimes they make more money from the latter business than the former. And in that case, the vendor can exhibit tremendous pressure to make sure that no negative remarks are made about their products or even steer analyst reports in the direction they would like.
(Investment firms had a similar problem until recent regulations required them to maintain a split between the side that provide investment advice and the side that does IPOs for firms).
Does this mean that Microsoft has paid Yankee Group enough money that they are saying negative things about Linux? Not necessarily. But it does call into question DiDio's statement, "I don't take any money from any vendor." I've seen at least one top-tier analyst firm (though not Yankee specifically to my recollection) who reported favorable market results for firms that paid a lot for their consulting services. And Microsoft has been known for exerting some pressure on companies it works with.
Any time you have an entity expected to be "objective" but who's existance depends on the largess of the firms it is supposed to be objective about, you must be wary of these conflicts of interest.
Just like how it's dubious to suggest the mainstream media is going to seriously bite the hand of the Republicans that feed it (read as, interviews, embedded reporters during war, or bigger media-consolidation regulation), the industry analyst firms can be just as susceptible to strong-arm tactics of vendors.
Sounds like a nice group, I want animals to be happy too. Then one day they came around a KFC in my neighborhood and members yelled at families going in for dinner, calling them murderers and supporting animal concentration camps. They had a bucket of fake blood they threw on someone. Instantly, nobody gave a damn about their group. More importantly, people would support the opposite side just because they hate PETA.
Same think could happen with Linux. What got me interested in Linux was friendly people who really liked it, and wanted to share what they knew about it. What turns me off, I went to a Linux group meeting and had a dual boot machine, Windows 2000 and Debian. Someone gave me shit for having Windows on the laptop. Another dork, and I use the word dork because I think nerd is too nice; anyways, another dork starts laughing and saying how Windows sucks and how easy it is to hack into. I had my machine hooked up to the LAN, and these idiots decided they wanted to try and hack my machine. They even asked me to "ipconfig" and tell them my exact IP address. They thought I was an idiot. After 5 minutes I left. Fuck them.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Generally, when Linux is used, it is because someone wants to use it. This immediately puts people on the defensive when criticized about their decision. When Windows is used, it is usually because someone has to use it or does not care.
In many ways, this makes their zealotry a simple defense mechanism which will cause them to become unrealistic and unobjective for no reason other than they see criticism of Linux as an attack on themselves.
I'm a huge OS X fan, and its done my heart good to see more and more acceptence of OS X at the enterprise level, but problems still exist, and until they are worked out, I wish the extremists would just shut up.
Chad Dickerson writes a column for InfoWorld, and a few weeks back he mentioned some issues he has with OS X. He had the nerve to mention that perhaps OS X wasn't meant for everyone and got a firestorm of hate mail. His blog offers more detail:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/dickerson/001225.html
And is easier to setup (for most distros) than windows from scratch
Huh?
I've installed, for various periods of time, a number of linux distros. Mandrake, a number of RedHats (6.something through FC2 I believe), and I currently run Gentoo. (For disclosure purposes, I also run XP on my laptop as well as a dual boot on my desktop, but I haven't been in anything but Gentoo on my desktop in ages.)
In no case can I pick any of these systems and say they were easier to set up than Windows. Windows is a truly idiot-proof setup. If you can set the time zone, you can get it installed and humming. All of the linux distros I used had at least some sort of package selection. I'm sure at least some, if not all, had a "just do what you want" option that would have made it basically the same as windows--but certainly not easier.
Once installed, the basics in setting things up for linux and Windows is either the same or tilted toward Windows, in my experience.
I'm really curious how you arrived at the conclusion that linux is easier to set up than Windows.
From the Wikipedia article on DiDio:
"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram, because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"
"I'm all for open source, and competition serves everyone's interest. But if Linux is really to take its place alongside Windows... then the vendors in this space cannot act like a bunch of hippies in a '60s commune or ashram. There really is no such thing as a free lunch."
She has a definite predisposal not to like open-source, right down to rejecting its philosophy and its ability to exist in a capitalist system... yet claims to be unbiased when her organization concludes that an open-source product inferior. She hates name-calling... but calls open-source developers communists and hippies.
As far as I'm concerned, she's getting what's coming to her.
>> A lot of businesses make their money by hiring developers and selling software. This is a business model many of us would like to see die.
Please tell me you're only talking about base OS utilities and desktops and the like. You don't seriously expect to see CAD, Mathematica, Gran Turismo, Oracle, or VMWare developed for free by the so-called "community"?! And what about a kernel for my big iron massively parallel arch server?
More importantly, how am I supposed to make a living then? My college education wasn't excatly free, know what I'm sayin'?
This kind of asinine remark is exactly the point of the Yankee group, just nut cases without a perspective of the big picture, just off in la-la land with the idealistic world where everybody does only what is good for the "community" and takes only what he needs, yea right.
OK, but the real question is: how do you keep the opposition from framing the debate?
If the trap is set and we respond in a quiet and reasoned fashion, we're going to lose the battle -- as you've pointed out.
And if we don't respond at all, the trap still springs, the opposition strategy still works. So how do you propose to keep the trap from being set in the first place?
licet differant, aequabitur
And, frankly, they have a point. Software freedom is an issue that occasionally gets burried by pricetags and flash. The fact that you mention "freeware" only demonstrates the point.
The last couple of times I saw some commercial software being announced for Linux and dismissed by "zealots" was products that were too little, too late. Software is a rough market. Your product has to compete - being available alone doesn't get you much (although apparently some think otherwise).
In my own consideration... if something isn't FOSS, it's already competing at a disadvantage. But there is proprietary software that manages to get my dollar vote none the less.
Wow. Wished I hadn't burned all my mod points about the spammer. I've seen Bill Gates make presentations that are less enthusiastic about Microsoft or hostile to Linux.
The open-source community's basic problem, as far as Didio et al are concerned, is that it doesn't give the Yankee Group enough money. It really is that simple.
Companies often take generic terms and turn them into names, and sometimes it happens the other way (Velcro is a trademark, hook and eye fastener is the general name, Kleenex is a trademark, tissue paper is the general name).
I'm not going to make any juvenile insults against MS for their names, but it is one thing that really irks me about them. It's like they have absolutely no creativity whatsoever when it comes to naming things. Some people might make the argument that MS wants it to be plainly obvious what the product is for, but they just go overboard. If some automaker made a car named, for instance, the "Chevy Sedan", they'd be laughed at. Some MS products do have thoughtful names, like Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, etc., but most of these seem to have been created when that particular product was owned and created by a different company, when MS later bought out. Their homegrown stuff usually has completely generic names, like SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows Media Player, etc. Overall, I think this just reflects on the company as a whole.
As for zealots, you're going to have those on all sides, and their arguments are never going to be good. A smart and unbiased person should simply be smart enough to identify zealots and avoid them, and not allow their opinions to affect them. If you have a colleague at work who always wears t-shirts with Chevy emblems, and his cube is wallpapered with pictures of Chevies, and you overhear him constantly talking about how great Chevies are and how crappy "them foreign cars" are, why on earth would you ask him for advice on buying a car? It's pretty obvious where his preferences lie. But you also shouldn't avoid Chevies simply because this one fool makes them look bad by putting down the competition. (Actually, I don't like Chevies myself, but if you're going to take the word of a single anonymous guy on Slashdot about what car to spend $20k+ on, you really have gullibility issues.)
A lot of businesses make their money by hiring developers and selling software. This is a business model many of us would like to see die.
Reminds me of a sig I've seen here; "Information wants to be free. Mortgage wants to be paid."
Why do you want to see pay-for software die out? Why should the creation of software be any different to the creation of any other work? Or do you believe that *all* works (music, books, etc) should be free, with the creators supported either by other jobs or - for the lucky few - rich sponsors?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts /videos/didio_video.wvx
MS's top execs don't gush that much about Windows.
Watch it and tell us again how she is objective.
Objective my ass.
Didio is just trying to discredit her critics:
the issue *isn't* that open source advocates are attacking her analysis.
the isue *is* that open source advocates have discovered that:
1. she teamed up with a microsoft gold partner to perform the analysis
2. they sent the survey to subscribers to a microsoft publication (a completely biased sample)
3. the analysis & survey don't match up well - a considerable amount of apparently unfounded interpretation occured.
So, are open source advocates sometimes excessive? Sure. But more to the point: Didio's analysis was beyond flawed - it was deceptive. And that discredits her as well as Forester.
That's kind of backwards as then there is no incentive to make their software easy to use or install, and actually creates a disincentive because that means hard to use software generates more support money.
sendmail
As for Gimp and Photoshop, I just used both in the last 24 hours, both work fine for me. Having used Gimp more regularly, I'm starting to find that Photoshop is becoming harder to use instead of Gimp. The opposite was true in the past, as I always believed as many do that Photoshop simply had a superior UI. Now that I remember better where the tools are in Gimp, I'm starting to find that the opposite is true. And I'm finding that Gimp is using fewer resources on my Linux computers than on Windows. But that's just me.
The problem with Ms. Didio however is bigger. Are you aware that she has had more than just an analyst relationship with one of the SCO old timers, iirc? I'm not talking about a personal relationship ala dating. In the last few months, if I recall correctly, it came out either by herself or by another reporter that knows her that she has been in contact with Yarro for decades, and iirc, the relationship wasn't of analyst/exec, it was "friends" if I got that right. I don't remember the article verbatim, but the relationship to Yarro that was explained hit me like a bolt of lightening because it explained her bias about as well as Rob Enderle's relationship with Bill Gates:
Further, Ms. Didio has pumped out more than one "independent survey" that is a little less than independent. From exactly how the questions are worded, to using multiple choices that don't allow alternative answers, to using pro-Microsoft audiences as the target audience for the surveys: