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.'"

Comments

As a Microsoft customer...

[enjerth]

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.

TCO?

[pionzypher]

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.

Consumers Can't Evaluate Free Properly

[MBCook]

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.

Re:TCO: Doesn't include the hardware to run Vista

[Ash Vince]

Aparently his version of TCO doesn't include buying completely new machines in order to run Vista. A new machine is usually cheaper than single day wasted by a highly skilled member or staff. If you are taking about some executives then a single hour can buy a laptop.

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.