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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.'"
Wouldn't be interesting to see them show a fully configured Win98, 2000 and XP systems along with Linux to show what compelling reasons to move to the newest and best MS has to offer.
Linux is only a small part of their competition. Their own installed base is much bigger
Talk about redundant 101.
Microsoft are giving customers a chance to look at linux running in an environment of their choosing because they damn well know if they don't there's a good chance this sampling will take place in an environment not of their choice, by people with a passion for the alternative.
Talk about business 101.
The Mothership
The parent story is highly misleading in regards to the actual article.
"...who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with Windows are planned or an advantage."
That's hardly accurate. The article says he was MS-biased. It also outlines tradeoffs between Windows and Linux. It's brief, but it fairly states the differences between Windows & Linux. Those are: integration vs. flexibility; user friendly vs. expert friendly; & propriety or single architecture vs. open architecture that runs on multiple platforms.
According to the article, Don Johnson makes no more assumptions than the parent as to what is "wrong" with Windows and "better" about Linux.
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.
I once read that the best way to get someone to swallow a lie is to mix a little truth into it. They showed the people Linux, then showed them the propaganda, disinformation, and blatant lies of their "Get The Facts" campaign.
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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
and bullshit..
"Linux runs on just about anything, whereas Windows has a targeted platform focus," he said, adding that one of the main reasons people started looking at Linux was to avoid vendor lock-in.
No. Try again.. People quit M$ because they are sick and tired of dishing out bucketloads of money everytime they want to do anything, because they are sick of rebooting 400 times a day, because they are sick of BSODs.. And on and on and on...
An entire OS on a single CDROM that does NOTHING out of the box except get you on the internet and get infected before you can patch it..
I didn't want to spend hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a word processor, a paint program, virus protection, firewall, etc...
For the cost of a blank DVD and an hour or so to download an ISO, I can have everything I want and more.
And the absolute best part is is that I no longer have the big pain in my wallet and my ass called M$..
Oh yeah, and I have ZERO pirated stuff.. ZERO...
No warez, no serialz, no gamez, nothing...
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.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
When I teach free computing courses to the community, I often teach that a lot of the frustrations that many of us have with computers are a result of trying to make them user friendly. This is because the original idea of a user friendly computer was that the user should be completely abstracted from the operation of the software (think Mac OS 8). So we are left with an opaque "magic box" and when it breaks we feel helpless because the error messages aren't helpful.* Furthermore, not only did Microsoft completely screw up this concept and impliment it badly but nobody bothered to actually tell the developers that error messages like "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" don't help users feel empowered about their computers.
When I worked at MS (PSS), you would be surprised how many people calling tech support mentioned that their first reaction on reading this error message was that the police had been notified. Fortunately with ME and XP the inappropriate tone of the error was finally fixed.
Then comes the fact that many versions of Windows allow you to go ahead and destroy your system because there is no concept of permissions (Win 9x) and so users have become quite resonably afraid of destroying their system and losing their work.
Say what you will about Linux and userfriendliness. However, I have found that novices are quite easily able to feel comfortable quickly on Linux. Intermediate users take a little longer. And there have never been any of these alarmist error messages that bring to mind swat teams coming to one's door... I guess the most alarmist error message one can see in Linux is a "Kernel Panic" but for people who spend their lives in X, they never see the text of the error message.
Linux provides a more comfortable environment for learning how to use the computer for many users. I can't tell you how many of my customers are now using it for this reason. My cusotmers know that they can accidently delete their work, but they can't crash their system unless they are logged in as root. So they tend to be more adventurous about learning new things.
* Compare with a transparent system like Linux where often the error messages are very descriptive, but the user doesn't have to know what they mean. But when you call support, it is usually *extremely easy* to pinpoint the cause. For example error messages like "Error in line 156 of httpd.conf: tomcat.so Is this really a valid dynmaically shared object?"
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think we would be better served by a drop down menu with choices about deleting the last character, word, sentence, paragraph, etc. Perhaps this could be a new feature developed for Longhorn and backported to XP.
Oh, don't forget lots of "Are you sure?" boxes to click on.
Sorry for the rant, I've spent the last 8 hours supporting crappy MS programs for stupid people.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html