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Microsoft Axes 'Get The Facts'
tom66 writes "Seems like a long time coming, as Microsoft today has axed it's Anti-Linux campaign 'Get the Facts', and Microsoft has replaced it with a new campaign, called 'compare'. This article touches up on why they may have done it, and the criticism surrounding Get the Facts."
"Compare Windows to Linux"
Even in the earlier campaign they just refer to "Linux" in the print advertisements and they never specify which version of softwares on which version of distribution that they have compared (Once they had compared Redhat Linux 7.1 with Windows XP!).
It is time that responsible people from Linux Mark Institute take a note of this and sue them for libel!
I will tell you of an another great lie, a lie that has existed for decades and continues to be swallowed whole. It is not related but it shows how people lack common sense.
In holland you got a consumer watch agency (consumentenbond) that does (unbiased) comparetive reviews, payed by people who subscribe to them. Pretty good BUT and honest in general as far as I know BUT one of their reviews is one big lie.
It compares the prices in supermarkets and comes with a list of supermarkets by price. You can imagine that the one who is found to be cheapest crows about this a lot.
So what is the lie?
Simple, they buy at each store a selection of standard BRANDNAME goods that an ordinary family might need, and compare the price.
This is NOT all goods a family might need in a full year and offcourse it totally ignores non-brandname goods.
Now here is the killer, the largest supermarket chain in holland (Albert Heijn) often stocks three versions of the same product: cheapo crappy brand (euroshopper) / its own label / big name brand.
The odd thing is that its own label if actually preffered by many people, for instance their peanut butter to me tastes a lot better then the brandname version (its cheapo version is truly disgusting). Yes this cheaper but better peanut butter is NOT on the shopping list.
It gets even sillier with things like sugar, a chemical product where a brandname can offer no additional value except a nicer paper bag. Yet the shopping list insists on getting the brandname product.
For yet more sillyness, a dutch consumer program Kassa, does product reviews including foods and has shown time and time again that cheapo products vs brandname products are NOT always a winner for the exensive products, a reall killer was chocolate letters a few years ago where the extremely cheap no-brand one carried by ALDI beat the established big-brands that were several times cheaper PURELY on quality. Not price vs quality, PURELY on quality.
ALDI products have won several times in these reviews, yet scores low in the price review because it doesn't carry many brandnames.
So what the fuck is your point? This is news for Nerds, not housewives! you might say.
Simple, it shows how biased any review is even when it tries to be honest. Even something as simple as deciding WHAT to review can introduce bias.
It would offcourse be unfair if the supermarket review just picked the lowest priced version of a product because that would just review price, not quality, so they go for a given quality (the exact same brand/jar-size/flavour of peanut butter) and just compare price but this ignores that this might not be the best price/quality product available.
The real truth? Well, that means that at AH you need to shop for their own brand name products and special offers, and go to Edah (the price winner) for brandname products and go to ALDI (the straight cheap price winner) for those products were quality if irrelevant (toilet paper, sugar, etc etc).
The same is true in IT, even if a review tries to be honest, you gotta ask yourselve WHAT they reviewed. One that is often missing with regards to linux is the cost of support. Not in the way most people mean it however. Say that you got a qaulity techinical team already, do you REALLY need outside support then if your own people already contribute to the kernel?
It would be like a car mechanic shop paying for car repairs on their own cars. Seems a bit silly, just maintain them yourselves.
Just because a review lists support as important doesn't mean it is important to YOU.
That is the real kicker in OS reviews, the variousses OS'es out there are totally different beasts, trying to do different things in different ways. One of the fundemental MS differences is that its servers are also a desktop. Windows 2003 can easily be converted into a XP like product capable of playing games. It leads to many a MS server being administered directly from its desktop (even if i
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
thanks for the linke whineymacfanboy :)
A little down the road you ll find
"Red Hat includes the Yum update tool to help you download packages and software updates, but doesn't address IT professionals' broader needs--managing applications and workloads, like mail and collaboration, database and business applications."
Give me a break. Is the guy who wrote this nuts?
What blatant lie.
Enough with FUD, i am going to format my windows partition at work machine too.
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
No, I think TENTH SHOW JAM might be on to something there.
These things DO pop up very early in most threads critical of Microsoft.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I think much of the bloat in Office is because it's faster for the Office developers to re-invent the wheel than to search the Windows API's for things to reuse.
Or maybe the standard API functions don't provide feedback on progress made. Suppose you want to implement a particular operation such as downloading a file using http. The standard API function call may just do the task and return, or timeout with an error. For a quality user interface you want a progress bar to indicate how far into the download the file has taken.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And if you do a search on MSN for "How to migrate from windows to Linux" the first site it returns is their "Get the Facts" webpage.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Enough said. Microsoft is just being silly. In the long term they cannot compete. I do find it quite amazing that Linux on the desktop doubled in the past year. I would expect even greater growth now that the nasty DRM nightmare called Vista is out and is showing its true colors. 47 programs that spy on you, WGA/WGN accusing you of stealing and then searching your home (your computer is an extension of your home after all). With performance issues relating to the implementation of the hardware requirements dictated to the hardware manufacturers, etc.
I think this is just a silly mess that Microsoft has created for itself. They forgot one important thing. Serve the customer. You don't go violating everyone privacy because you want a few extra billion dollars--billions more than the billions you already have. Just pathetic. They have markets greater than you can imagine in the world and they are violating our privacy, invading our homes, manipulating the police authorities into stupid raids on xbox modchip makers. Just pathetic.
Now they are saying they like open source but it must be Microsoft Windows only code? That's not open source. And then they have the gall to try to win a comparison war? I think FOSS wins, hands down.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.