Microsoft's 'Hands-On' Linux Lab

aneroid writes "eWeek has a story on Microsoft allowing a third party to present a 'hands-on lab' that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software at its annual worldwide partner show in Minnesota this weekend. It was run by Don Johnson (not the actor), who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with Windows are planned or an advantage. Whether it's for the desktop or server, wasn't clear. People did get to 'see the Apache Web server in action' and a KDE desktop.Is this more of a preemptive strike where the Linux experience is so bad (slow machines, old software) they wouldn't bother to check it out in the future, thus securing an existing partner/client? Or are they that confident people won't stray if they're invited to sample the competition? According to the Register, 'Microsoft is unlikely to stop developers moving to Linux and open source so its best hope lies in articulating a strategy of co-existence to limit the 'damage' to its business.'"

Comments

This is odd....

[Anonymous Coward]

So far the Microsoft anti-linux campaign has been driven by FUD. Mostly anecdotal claims to shield the real battle between Windows and Linux.

Now they seem to really believe that Windows is superior. They believe it to the point of "proving" it to the users. I'd be interested to hear the reaction from the attendees. My guess is that a few PHBs got a reality check, linux is actually better off than Microsoft claims. A gutsy move for Microsoft IMHO.

I refer to my boss as the typical PHB candidate. 5 years ago my boss boldy told me "we will never be a linux shop". Last week I got our 3rd RHEL server up in production, and he's loving the cost savings. What made him change his mind? Opinions of other IT directors were a good part of it, but Microsoft helped a little too. He realized that linux was a viable product as soon as Microsoft started their anti-linux campaign. For Microsoft to launch a campaign against another OS must mean it has the potential of market share. A free OS with market share is worth checking out in his opinion.

Re:This is odd....

[utlemming]

Here is the interesting thing about demonstrations: the people that are really interested are going to go and check out the competition. At work, one of my responsabilities is that of a buyer. I go to trade shows am charged with product selection. While I do take into account what I am told by the vendor, I actually have to see the difference. But one thing that I will do, if I am really interested in a product is to check out what the competition has to offer. I don't just make a major decision based on what a vendor has to show me. In fact, one decision that translated to nearly $20K was made over a series of months before I committed my company. Further, another decision to drop one product line for another, which is a $50K decision has been made over the course of a year. So while Microsoft may be moving around telling people about how Windows is better, it will only work for the causual shopper. For example, when I need something that I really could careless about, I am more apt to buy the big name brand. But the serious shopper for a server solution, and is not under any restraints that would keep them from adopting another solution will be more inclined to actually check out what the competiton has to offer. Maybe I am a cynnic, but every time a vendor has an example of the competition, I have learned that vendors rarely, if ever, compare their best to the competitions best. If Microsoft was really doing a best-to-best, and then even a worst-to-worst comparision, I would be really impressed. But the goal is to sell more Windows. There is going to be a bias no matter what. Anyway, the point is that most buyers know that when making a major purchasing decision, you have to verify the claims. Those who need to feel good about their Windows purchases will like the demonstrations, and those who want to make it look like they researched the options will like it. But the person that is serious about finding their best solution will be more apt to look past the demonstration, and find what they really want and really need -- whether it is Windows or Linux or BSD or Solaris or MacOS.

Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[einhverfr]

1) Johnson seems to feel that one must know the command line to use Linux....

My parents have used Linux since Red Hat 6.2 (what, 7 years now?) and have been quite happy with it.

They don't have to know how the command line works. If that is necessary, I will walk them through it (haven't had to in years) but I do the same for WIndows customers so that doesn't matter.

Of course if you want to run a web server, you might want to know the basics of the OS you are working on and be willing to learn the command line, but that is another matter...

2) Integration of user experience: Both KDE and GNOME offer this sort of integration to a large degree. Larger OSS projects like OpenOffice also offer such integration within themselves.

3) The flexibility of Linux does NOT just come from the ability to tweek and recompile the software. Instead it is the fact that you have a lot of pieces that do things well and can easily strung together (by someone know knows the system) into more complex systems. There is no reason I could not write a Perl/GTK program that could take a large number of programs and automate them behind the scenes. For other examples, see FileRoller, SimpleCDR-Tools, and a number of other packages that can make people's lives a lot easier when it comes to Linux. But this is more of a RAD environment than a user environment.

Re:Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[catscan2000]

To paraphrase a past president, "I feel your pain!"

I recently upgraded the laptop I'm typing this on to Fedora Core 4 by wiping Windows XP and Fedora Core 3, which worked well, completely off the drive first to ensure a totally clean install. Fedora Core 4 installed properly, but I could not get the wireless card to work with my 128-bit WEP network to save my life. It worked in FC3, but not in FC4. Oh, and don't get me started with all the other hardware and software that I would have to get working in FC4 manually, including the soft-modem, sleep mode, RealPlayer, DVD playback, and Java. I use FC4 at work and it works well, but getting FC4 working on a laptop made me so frustrated that I ultimately destroyed my FC4 DVD on a mad rampage and then discarded it.

Looking for a replacement distro, I decided to give Novell SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 a try through its free FTP-download-based installation method.

Until Fedora Core gets its act together, I'm not going back after having the extreme pleasure of installing and using SuSE Linux Professional! Really, it's that much better. SLP 9.3 and Fedora Core aren't even in the same league. Seriously, it's like comparing Windows 3.1 in all its AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and WIN.INI glory with Mac OS X, with FC being Win 3.1 and SLP 9.3 being Mac OS X.

Not only did SLP's YaST, the system's comprehensive configuration management tool, detect _all_ of my laptop's hardware, it noticed that my eth1 was a wireless network card and graphically prompted me for the WEP settings. And it worked! No futzing with /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 files and the like! It also noticed that I had a softmodem, installed the proper software to control it, and proceeded to the modem's configuration screen. It even installed a ThinkPad control panel (I have an IBM ThinkPad) without me having to do that manually! Sound, video, 1394, even Bluetooth were all set up without me having to futz with any configuration files. As a very pleasant surprise, and something that James Gosling can appreciate, "the lid works!" (sleep mode and hibernate)

I believe that I have finally found an OS besides Mac OS X that I can recommend to others. I was previously a FC fanboy, and I still like FC3, but I could never recommend FC to others, and I certainly cannot recommend FC4, especially on laptop computers.

It's really hard to describe the awesomeness that is SuSE Linux Professional 9.3, so try it out for yourself! Go to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/d ownloads/suse_linux/index.html , scroll to the bottom, and read the instructions for the "SUSE LINUX 9.3 ftp version." One caveat that I must mention is that the autopartitioner, at least on my system, didn't automatically create a /boot partition at the beginning of the hard drive. Depending on your hardware, you really should ensure that a ext2 (or ext3) /boot partition is created at the beginning of the drive (100MB should work fine). Otherwise, GRUB might not be able to load SuSE (that was actually the only problem that I ran into, which is more of an installer issue than a system issue). Other than that, everything should "just work" :-).

Oh, and SuSE includes Sun Java 1.4.2 and 1.5, Java Eclipse (not a buggy GCJ compiled version), Macromedia Flash, RealPlayer, Adobe Acrobat 7, and other goodies built-in; no hacks or editing of files /etc/yum.repo.d required. If you want DVD playback and Windows Media Codec support in Kaffeine, the media player, follow the easy instructions (even all-GUI) at http://www.plainfaqs.org/linux/dvdplay/ . Every Windows Media Player movie that I opened with it worked (I believe it's using official Microsoft DLLs coupled with winelib, and Wine is also built into SuSE), and every DVD that I tried worked prope

Daniel Robbins at work?

[Ingolfke]

I wonder if this is the first wave of the new ideas Daniel's got for the Microsoft crowd. (see here for the backstory)

most people would chose msft in that situation

[walterbyrd]

JMHO.

I run various versions of linux, and windows, on the same PC all the time. Franking, in a 5 minute demo, I think windows would win. Especially if viewed by a total newbie, or somebody who only knew windows.

Windows has a sharp, snappy, display. Plenty of eye candy. Applications launch fast. Linux is okay, but I think windows would win *that* sort of comparison.

After a few months, of going back and forth between both systems; I think a lot of people would chose Linux. With Linux you don't get the software rot, or the adware/spyware/viruses. Also, once you learn a little bit about how to use linux, it's more powerful and flexible. And with Linux, you don't have msft on your back.

Again, all totally based on my guess.

Makes too much sense for MS to work with Linux

[bigbinc]

This is one of those stupid manager decisions that we can watch first-hand. Microsoft "not" adopting a serious Linux(open source) strategy will just make them look silly. They won't lose money, but I know they could make some serious money-making technology.

Microsoft should get in bed with Linux and go to work. They keep trying to play with it. Microsoft could clean up if they had a Microsoft desktop environment or something similar. They did it with the Mac? With Office, why not write software for Linux?

They are acting like a bunch of babies, "We are Microsoft, we are better, so we won't worry about Linux.". What a bunch silliness. Same thing happened when they didn't take Java seriously. What JVM does Microsoft support, version 1.1? A 10 year-old could write an update to date virtual machine. Microsoft, get a clue.

Driver Issues?

[csharp_wannabe]

From Article

"Device drivers are also problematic for Linux, Johnson said, because while there are several hardware vendors committed to Linux solutions and to releasing device drivers, a lot of this device driver support lags for Linux and is often almost immediately available for Windows, he said."

I believe that this is a falicy. I feel that sometimes that Linux-based Operating Systems (Especially Ubuntu) do have the same, if not more, hardware support. I have Ubuntu 5.04 and it picked up all my Centrino hardware, which pleased me to no end. XP picked up the hardware, but did not configure it correctly as Ubuntu did. I mean honestly, the balls on Microsoft must be big to say such a statement without checking out the competition thuroughly.

My 2 cents, take it or leave it...

Re:Smart move, indeed

[Kjella]

While I know that tools like Webmin exists, and are very capable, an average person will expect something integrated into KDE.

I always thought it might be a good idea to create some form of text -> dialog parser, with basic structure data in the configuration file. Something kinda like doxygen except with support for some basic elements like checkboxes, radiobuttons, drop-downs, spinboxes and the like, as well as grouping elements like tabs, groupboxes etc.

#[Download]
#T: Foo means it will do foo, bar means it will do bar.
#C: With foo
foo = 0
#C: With bar
bar = 0

And then you'd get a dialog with a "Download" box, with text "Foo means it will do foo, bar means it will do bar." and two checkboxes "With foo" and "With bar". As they are checked/unchecked the text file is updated.

If you're editing directly in the text files, simply don't touch that. If you're editing in the dialog mode, you can't touch that. That could hopefully become a standard, using either a GUI or TUI (text UI, for SSH and the like). That way noone would really need to see the junk.

That way, you could also dress it up natively any way you want it.

Kjella

That kinda defeats the point...

[rsilvergun]

since 90% of what Windows has on Linux happens before the two are fully configured. What Microsoft brings to the table is an OS that can be admined by $12 dollar/hr employees instead of $50 dollar/hr ones. With hardware so cheap (and with value added upgrade cycles so short) this makes perfect sense.

Re:Maybe they should look at their past too

[Coryoth]

I think you missed my point. Since 1998 Microsoft has made small incremental improvments to Windows (okay moving to the NT line with Win2k was useful, but from an end user perspective...) Since 1998 Linux has gone from a desktop OS only a devout hacker could love to something almost on par with Windows. That says to me that in 5 years time it will be Windows playing catch up to Linux on the desktop, not vice versa.

Jedidiah.

Re:Maybe they should look at their past too

[drsmithy]

That says to me that in 5 years time it will be Windows playing catch up to Linux on the desktop, not vice versa.

What it should say to you is Linux had a lot further to come.

Improvement rates tend to slow dramatically as the product reaches the "good enough" point. Another example is OS X, which for a few years had very quick releases with major improvements - but the flipside is it had a lot further to go. OS X's release rate has slowed dramatically as less things have needed improving. The same will happen to Linux.