"Get the Facts" Campaign Working

brontus3927 writes "According to a Reseller Advocate Magazine write-up, Microsoft seems to be winning its war against Linux. Info-Tech Research Group recently ran a survey that is now being used on Microsoft's Get The Facts campaign. In it were some surprising results. 'After polling 1,400 IT managers and CIOs in SMB corporations, his group found that 48% were not interested in Linux, 15% were not sure about Linux, and only 10% plan to evaluate Linux." Despite this, two-thirds of all webservers run Linux. The disparity in these numbers comes from the fact that most smaller companies' websites are hosted by service providers running Linux servers even if the company itself isn't."

Comments

Slowing adoption

[panxerox]

Its not like MS can win a fud war against a free / quality product, this they showed Netscape. MS can slow Linux adoption but this by itself wont stop it, but if they combine a campain to slow linux combined with patent blanketing and file format lockin they may be able to marginalize linux.

Re:Slowing adoption

[NtroP]

It's not a choice of which one is 'better' (for one of any number of reasons) but which one works best for us.

My parents had 2 windows PC's. They were constantly infected with viruses, pop-ups and other problems that caused my father, in particular, a lot of data loss. Every couple of months they'd take it in to the local repair shop. There, they would either re-install the OS (blowing away any data my dad forgot to back up) or occasionally sell my dad an "upgraded component" like more RAM, faster CPU, etc. "to help with the speed problems".

For years I tried to get my parents to buy a Mac. 90% of what they do is platform agnostic and they aren't gamers. For years my dad kept saying, "yeah, macs might be pretty good - I've heard good things about them, but this works better for me". WTF? How is it working better for you, dad? What you mean is that you are familiar with it. You fear change. The thought of a little pain for a world of gain frightens you, and besides, you have all this money and time invested in your current equipment. Which, by the way, you've paid for 10 times over in repair/upgrade fees, lost productivity, and heartache.

Two years ago I bit the bullet and paid for a G4 iBook out of my own pocket. I configured everything for what I knew they would need including VPC for the one PC-only, gotta-have app my dad uses. I gave it to them to as a gift, spent a few hours with them walking them through the differences to make sure they could do some basic troubleshooting, etc. and sent them on their way. About 6 months later I got a call from my dad saying he was having problems. I thought "crap! this wasn't supposed to happen". It turned out that his virtual PC image had gotten infected with malware (I told him not to surf from within VPC!) and it was "having the same problems his other computers were".

Phew! Fortunately, I had made a backup image of his VPC drive and had configured all his PC apps to use shared space (on the mac volume for saving data). I old him to drag the bad image to the trash, go to the "backups" folder and Option-drag the Windows2K file back into the VPC Folder. He was impressed. Now he does all his "critical windows stuff" on his mac. I've almost even got him convinced to install Linux (either Xandros or Kubuntu) on his PC's.

How does this relate to the Parent Poster? All my dad knew, all he'd invested in financially, time-wise, pain-wise, was Windows. And he said "It works better for me". What is that supposed to mean? Better than what? Does my daughter's Daewoo Nubira work better than my Mercedes? Just how would you have to define "better" to make it fit. She's never even driven my Mercedes. Does her car work for her? Yes. Does that mean that, if I were to give her my car, and let her get a chance to get used to it that it wouldn't in the long term work better for her? What are the chances that 10 years down the road she'd be still driving the Nubira? How about the Mercedes (well, assuming I gave it to her :-)?

At work we still have several servers running RH 6.2 on old, but high-quality hardware. I keep them patched, almost never have to re-boot them (except for the occasional kernel patch), keep the firewalls tuned, and forget them. BTW, they were my first Linux boxes, coming from an all-Windows background. It was a steep learning curve (especially back then, before the simple, graphical installation we have now. But I made the choice to take the risk and it has paid off in spades. 75% of our critical infrastructure has been migrated away from windows. We still use windows where it makes sense. We still have an Active Directory Domain which we will be upgrading to Win2K3 this summer. But, we are beginning to implement OpenLDAP and plan on letting that slowly take over the AD duties wherever we can. We are rolling out OpenOffice/NeoOffice and FireFox on all new computers by default.

I can say which OS's in which

Re:Slowing adoption

[FireFury03]

Of course, admins love Windows. They hate Linux and Macs, because companies running these systems don't need as many admins.

I was installing some (Linux based) networking kit at a reasonably big customer a few weeks ago.

Now, from my perspective, if someone told me that one of my Linux systems had been compromised I'd say "oh shit" and be dropping everything to take it offline and reinstall, or at least clean it ASAP. (Yep, compromises _do_ happen on Linux kit but are reasonably infrequent if you keep stuff up to date, and 9 times out of 10 are caused my human error such as forgetting to turn on scheduled yum updates or leaving a weak password on a server).

While I was doing this install, I had to inform the customer that it looked like one of his (many) windows servers had been hit by some worm (lots of network traffic hitting random addresses on the internet on obviously microsofty ports). The reaction kind of shocked me - it was pretty much "oh well, happens all the time, I'll fix it later".

I think this says a lot about Windows admins - they have so many security problems that a random exploit (which, for all they know, could be posting confidential data all over the place) is considered pretty much the norm and unimportant.

One single positive thing..

[Chicane-UK]

Microsoft seems to be continuing its efforts to rubbish Linux and the Open Source movement, but i've noticed one positive thing to come out of this.

It seems the IT journalists are no longer taking what Microsoft says as gospel.. you read any Microsoft vs Linux type article or report and you'll see that the press regularly question Microsofts reasonings behind its attacks on Linux. In fact, apart from the handful of sites that seem to be permanently pro Microsoft, the majority seem sceptical about Microsoft! The BBC especially does a superb job on giving fair balance in its reports.

Clearly Linux is beginning to get a major foothold, and I still genuinely feel Microsoft is worried and getting more so every day.

Re:One single positive thing..

[basil montreal]

I sell servers to the SMB space and I have always mentioned Linux as an option, but I have less than 2% of my server sales being bundled with Linux. I always get the same answer: people in the SMB space think of Linux as more of a enterprise tool. It is complicated to learn, and windows comes in a nice shiny box that they've been buying for years. It's a hard paradigm to break as a vendor... especially when MS products generate so much revenue.

GNU/Linux get the facts

[btk667]

When will we have a linux version of get the facts?
We should compile a list of reason why GNU/linux is better or why it's TCO is lower.

There are reasons why UNIX/Linux is better and there are also some arguments why "Windows" or closed source are good in some case.

I haven't seen a objective debate about this.

Well, I got some facts

[argoff]

First fact, I make heavy use of Linux and open source and my skills are way way more in demand than my MS counterparts. And that reflects in my pay, and the fact that people are always coming to me for solutions.

Second Fact, I can often provide all the IT infrastructure my company needs without even requesting a PO. In fact, while ohter people get haggled every time they make a purchase, I rarely even get questioned - which I think is because I do way more with way less then my counterparts do.

Third fact, I really have few worries about an unwelcome visit from the BSA, and I don't mean boy scounts of america.

Frouth fact, I rarely need to deal with all the license headaches, and the annual renew crap and forced upgrades that my counterparts do. In fact, upgrades and improvements are not a chore, and I am not terrorized that every upgrade will break everything.

Fith fact, I get the pleasure of doing more RnD, because I don't need financial approval from a bean counter everytime I do something.

Sixth fact, I rarely pay extra for things like compilers, office productivity stuff, graphics programs, and visus scanning is't even a worry accept for scanning linux SMB servers for others.

Seventh fact, things like paravirtualisation, parallel clusters, email, databases, dns, web servers, and remore access to programs come standard in Linux.

Eight fact, I can literally rip a Linux box out of one x86 box and place it in another and run kudzu and it recovers ausomely. Have you ever tried this with Microsoft?

Ninth fact, those are all red herrings. What makes Linux vavuable is that it's not about technology, but freedom. People who talk about business and not freedom are cowards and ingrates to the culture and attitudes that made them successfull to begin with and over the long term they will certainly get what they deserve.

today's status

[speedbump]

This kind of article always brings out the same argument, which we've beaten to death in this forum.

The question seems to be, is Microsoft winning 'the war'?

Oh, come now. All they are doing is fighting a rear-guard action. How could they possibly win in the long-term? The only way would be if we collectively stopped developing Linux and the applications which run on it, and go back to always buying Windows products. Does anyone really think that's going to happen?

I am currently consulting for a company which has a variety of systems and applications going. About half of their software development effort goes to in-house, never-to-be-published applications. The other half is specifically for the purpose of public consumption. You know what? The public consumption side is all running or being converted to Linux/Apache/Tomcat. The internal stuff is still up for grabs, but this is a cultural issue, not a question of the technical merits of MS vs the world.

I had a short timeframe to develop my current project, and I ended up going C# and .NET, because the other developer was a VB guy, and the learning curve for him would have made it impossible to meet our deadline. I am comfortable with the Linux/Apache world, and generally prefer it, but I must admit that we whipped out a smokin' application, thanks to the data support from Visual Studio. (Interesting side note: this app has VB for the data layer, but C# for the business logic and the presentation layer. We had absolutely no trouble integrating the two languages.)

The Linux/Apache/Java side of the house is also grudgingly admitting we did a great job getting a fully-functional app out the door in a short timeframe. But they are also doing interesting things with Lucene and some other child projects of Apache.

The state of things now at the comapny are that getting the job done is Job #1, and the folks who write the checks don't care whether MS is in the loop or not. But, as more of our IT staff begin using open source tools, the more our tech staff will start saying to the bean counters, 'hey, we don't need to buy a Microsoft license for this or that project.' And the beanies are going to be happy to go along with that!

What's interesting to me, as a long-time Linux and FreeBSD guy, is that the quality of development tools that MS has had to create is a direct result of having to compete with the open source alternatives. And the quality and utility of those tools is accelerating.

The real story is that WE win.