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Novell CEO Gives Behind the Scenes Account of Microsoft Deal
raffe writes "Here is a Q&A with Ron Hovsepian CEO of Novell. He describes 'a love-hate thing' between the two companies." From the article:
"This past May, I picked up the phone and called Kevin Turner, the COO at Microsoft. I knew Kevin when he was the CIO at Wal-Mart. I said, "Kevin, I'd like to have a conversation about what the customer needs. If you could put back on your old hat as a customer, if I came in and started talking to you about virtualization on Linux, and this Microsoft guy showed up and started talking to you about virtualization on Windows, what would you say to us?""
Yes, apparently (judging by feedback) some folks around here like the slapping on the backs congratulating each other how great Linux uptime is and how poor the uptime of Windows is.
The matter of the fact is though, that many people that actually use Windows, even those that pretty much despise it (like myself), are not going to be convinced by your circle jerk.
I mean seriously:
I'm pretty much a windows expert. I can do pretty much anything with a windows machine EXCEPT keep it running for more than a month.
I'm NOT a Windows expert, but I have about 6 Windows boxes around the house that pretty much only get shutdown for reasons that can't be blamed on the OS. I don't know how much time exactly goes between reboots, and frankly, I don't care. It's extremely rare that I have to shut one down because it has become unstable. (mind you, it does happen, but I've also seen my share of kernel panics)
I find it rare when dealing with a PC over 6 months old to not have a rootkit or some such garbage installed
How many do you want? I've NEVER had a virus or rootkit or anything like that on ANY of my Windows boxes. You are probably talking about machines of users that, well, don't know any better. As much as people hate it when it's being said; the same thing would have happened if Linux had the same popularity as Windows. Linux may be more secure by design, but the biggest problem is that people just aren't. They just want the gawdam Garfield Mouse Cursor. You can say that you would have never granted root access to your mother. I've seen enough mothers that would have gone through the effort to just reinstall the OS entirely (most likely without knowing it) to get their Weather Report in the system tray. Both Linux and Windows as well as PCs in general have some fundamental flaws that have yet to be resolved (and yeah sure, Windows tops the list).
Also: a "Good" windows admin will schedule reboots daily or weekly.
Now you are just making stuff up. If there's a reason to do that, it's only because of the applications (i.e. third party service) running on the box and pretty has nothing to do with Windows. It's very much possible to write a service for Linux that would basically bring the system to it's knees.
I mean, I hate to be defending freaking M$ here, but who are you guys trying to fool? Do you think you are doing the Linux community a service? Because I can guarantee you that avid/competent Windows users are not going to read this and go "ah! we switcheth the boxen to Linux!"
I hate Windows. I hate the way Microsoft has taken advantage of it's monopoly. I think many parts of the Windows kernel are not well designed, and more importantly because of legacy support is severly crippled. But I also don't think Linux is all that well designed (how long did it take to get a scheduler that approaches some form of real-timeness, and yes, I think that is important even for non-embedded OSs). If you can measure penis size by uptime, then yeah, perhaps Linux wins. But the stability in both OSs is pretty much entirely determined by third-party software, arcane hardware or third-party drivers.
If I had to rank those I would say that Linux probably wins on being able to deal with bad third-party software. Windows probably wins on dealing with arcane hardware, and both do equally bad when it comes down to (bad) third-party drivers.