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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."
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."
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.
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.