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Steve Ballmer on MS Server, Linux, Yahoo & More
yorugua writes "Furniture trembled as Steve Ballmer was to be interviewed by InformationWeek. He then went on to talk about Linux: 'How does Microsoft beat Linux? The same way "you beat any other competitor: You offer good value, which in this case means good total cost of ownership," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says.', Embrace-Extend-Extinguish: 'We say when we embrace standards, we'll be transparent about how we're embracing standards. [...] If we have deviations, we'll be transparent about the deviations.'"
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
|Linux is alot cheaper and has 1/10th of the issues
1/10 the issues because it has 1/10th of the user base. Linux would face all the same issues if it were uses daily by the same semi competent to non competent users that Windows has to deal with.
Not quite in this case. If you push with ten times the marketing and grab a huge lead, it's still linux. Thanks to the GPL it all has to be released. It's kind of like an elastic band. You can build a big lead (stretch the band), but the competitors will come up quick behind you because they have everything you do (snap back).
Of course, this does not account for microsoft linux not following the GPL, etc, but in theory that's how it will go.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
What does ownership have to do with anything? Ownership of a great license? Because if I remember correctly, you don't actually own the product.
Technicality? Not if the restrictive/intrusive license is your biggest objection to the product.
I thought we had moved past this and on to the fear of possible litigation for use. TCO is pretty damn easy to debunk. A few years ago I set up a little intranet server with LAMP and some scripts to retrieve and parse data that was scattered all over the place. Add in some ModbusTcp stuff and it was chugging along. Our instrument tech, who was working on a similar line gave us crap every day. The worn lines of "It's only free if your time is free", "linux is an OS for people mad at microsoft", "It's a hacker OS" and the wonderful "Microsoft knows how to do enterprise software, they make it easy". My answer was the simple one... It was free. I don't have a budget for this project, and this works. Forget arguing the deeper issues. It works and it didn't touch our budget.
Three years later, we've now moved a separate workstation over to linux for all of our operator functions such as data entry and trending.
End result... He's still working on implementing the reporting aspect. He pulls much of his data from our DB and is no longer quite a hardline about sticking with a single vendor. He's beginning to look at RT linux solutions for the next iteration of our embedded MCS system. Wow, hell of a tangent. Yeah, MS should leave the TCO alone... It's simply too easy to just set something up in a back room and let the technology prove itself.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
OK. You "offer a good value". Let's ignore how tough it is to offer good value compared to something really cheap, how do you compete with free? Consumers can't judge "free" properly, the Consumerist just posted about that the other day. Wouldn't that make competing with Linux even tougher? As it gets closer and closer to acceptable for most people (and it's WAY better than it was 2/4/6+ years ago) the free thing makes it even worse for MS.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Oh and lets not forget about the blanket licensing fees. What is the average? $12,000 per year for licensing and support per desktop?
You got a source on that number? By my estimate, the cost is nowhere near that for any decent admin. It may be that high for non decent admins, but you have those in both camps (Linux and Windows), in which case your support costs are going to be high either way.
You all are slipping... this is way to much fuel for the flame wars not to have at least double this many posts.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
He should be talking about "How does Microsoft beat its own older software?"
The GPL covers much more than the Linux Kernel, but that does not forbid Microsoft from offering binary applications through rape buddies like Novell. As you noted, others have done as much and people do use the results. What you failed to notice is the costs of i386 only binary blobs. They make updating a bitch and lock you into softare that's as obsolete and hard to upgrade as Windows itself. Those problems only highlight the TCO problems of their own platform and customers know it.
The real problem for M$ is that no one needs them. If you must run M$ stuff, you are better off doing it through Wine, Dosbox, Qemu or others. Done right, M$ can't tell your installation from any other and will have a hard time sabotaging you the way they have repeatedly done to other competitors. By the time an organization has decided to run free software, M$ has been moved into "legacy" status. Current applications will be run in virtual environments until they are no longer needed. The move to GNU/Linux is driven by freedom. M$ is out until they give up and offer customers what customers really want.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Where I work we used to have a large number of memory leaks in one of our applications code (written by someone else before I joined the company). I wanted to audit the code and fix them as that seemed like the correct thing to do. I was overruled and told to just go and put vast amounts of memory in each server running the application. Since the application in question was only intended to be used for a five year project and that is nearly up this was a sound financial bet, we never fixed the code, but we did fix the issue effecting our customers by the cheapest possible means.
Since everyone out there is familiar with windows from their home machine Windows gets it's much lower TCO from the money saved by not having to train your staff in the use of a new OS. The occasional inconvenience windows throws at us is not enough to justify the loss in productivity of training all our staff to a new and unfamiliar OS.
I dont read
You are getting a discount for volume and a discount (CALS) for being 100% MS. Not everyone gets that deal.
I don't think it's 12K/user unless they have one user and have bought one of everything at retail price, but I think your figure is a bit low. You DO have to add in physical server costs, backup costs, electricity, racks and floor space as well to get TCO.
It's not just licensing, scalability kicks in too with large apps that use multiple servers. If it takes 12 servers to run the app with Win2K3 and SQL but only 8 with Lunix and a database such as MySQL then there is an instant savings of more than 33%.
So the same techs at 50K each take care of 750 desktops and users, the 20 Win@K3 servers and the SQL servers? Thats a tremendous amount of work for two people. That number of servers really needs a dedicated sysadmin perhaps two or three depending on the expertise level of the admin and if 24x7 on-site is required. I've seen UNIX and Linux shops where they had one admin for every 150+ servers. The UNIX/Linux servers just don't require a lot of work. I know one business associate who has an old Sun Ultra-2 server that he hasn't had to reboot in serveral years.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..