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

How does microsoft beat linux?

[inflamed]

Microsoft will beat linux the same way they beat any competitor: by purchasing a rival (or in this partnering with Novell) and offering the same product with ten times the marketing force.

If you tell a lie long enough

[Billly Gates]

Eventually it will believed to be true. I think even the liar will start believing it.

Sadly many IT professionals believe Windows saves money because its an integrated platform. But ignore the reboots and being forced to buy alot more servers as Windows is not friendly with using one or 2 more apps on a single server compared to Unix.

Oh and lets not forget about the blanket licensing fees. What is the average? $12,000 per year for licensing and support per desktop? Uh yeah thats true TCO.

If it were not for Microsoft already setting the standards for Office the corporate world would have abandonded them years ago. Linux is alot cheaper and has 1/10th of the issues if only it could the VB apps and Office.

Re:If you tell a lie long enough

[Serapth]

That number is complete bullshit unless there are some SERIOUSLY major flaws at the company, or they have some pretty obscure needs ( military level security protocols, triple redundancy on everything they do, etc... ) that bloat the support costs.

At the last company I worked, we were @ 750 desktops. Under our EA agreement CALS for XP + Office Pro + Exchange + Messenger + Sharepoint were under 1000$ per user. Actual desktop support was handled by two techs making 50K/year each, so I guess for 750 desktops would be 100,000 / 750, or say 133$ per user on average.

Beyond desktop licensing, the only other costs I can think of are about 20 Win2K3 server licenses ( for various reasons ) at about 1000$ a shot, various 5 SQL server per proc licenses at 5K a piece and then Exchange server... not sure the cost there, but it was minimal as we were on CAL based licensing. So, from a server side of things, that adds another 20,000 + 25,000 == 45,000 in server licensing, meaning 45,000/750 = 60$ per user.

So, we were looking at 1000$ + 133$ + 60$ or 1193$ per user for all servers, desktop software licensing and physical support!. Finally we had ( at our peak ) 4 net techs averaging say 60K annually and 2 dev/sql guys again around 60K per year. So even factoring IT staff into the equation into the formula adds 360,000K to the number, or 480$ per user.

All thats really missing from this equation is connectivity charges, physical server costs, backup, utilities like hydro, etc... which you are going to have to pay regardless to technology you go with... otherwise thats a pretty accurate budget for running a 750 user IT shop using Windows tech.

No where close to 12,000$, not even by a long shot.

Re:If you tell a lie long enough

[markbark]

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.

You mean all those MS certified admins really have no idea how to run an enterprise infrastructure?
SAY IT AIN'T SO

--MAB

Persuade me I need Windows Server

[Colin Smith]

Because, frankly, Debian is making my life easy.

If Windows was any good...

[Joce640k]

They wouldn't need to mess around with protocols, etc.

But they already admitted that lock-in was necessary to stave off competition - in the famous "Halloween documents".

Bill Gates also said that open file formats and interoperability could be the death of Windows.

So this is all just spin. What's really going to happen is delays, obfuscation, API churn... and as many other spanners in the works as possible while still "complying" with the letter of the law, if not the spirit.

Re:Marketing Speak

[RLiegh]

...apart from cmdr taco raking in cash (in the form of ad revenue) off of the slashbot hordes that are queing up to post the usual "M$ sux" comments (which will race to +5 insightful) and lame jokes about ballmer throwing chairs (which invariably get rated +5 funny)?

No point at all.

TCO: Doesn't include the hardware to run Vista

[exabrial]

Aparently his version of TCO doesn't include buying completely new machines in order to run Vista. After all, Vista is only 1/2 as slow on the same hardware... I remember the day when your programs took more resources than the operating systems... those were the days.

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

[maird]

Vista is only 1/2 as slow on the same hardware

I had to ask...on what hardware is Vista twice as fast?

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.

"Embrace-Extend-Extinguish"

[VoxMagis]

Maybe I'm daft, but I'm not seeing this statement in this interview, although the original post seems to imply it's there.

Don't get me wrong, I don't LIKE Ballmer, and I'm no MS fan (as I type this from my Ubuntu desktop with Firefox, etc. etc. etc.) I just think they do their own damage, we don't need to add to it.

Re:Frankly...

[JordanL]

I find it mildly desturbing that the parent was modded "Informative" by anyone.

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.

The real Microsoft? Read Comes-3096.pdf

[kbonin]

A very illuminating Microsoft Confidential presentation from the antitrust discovery process. If you're in a hurry start with the slides at page 9. This is what he should have been asked about...

Comes-3096.pdf

Re:Frankly...

[tirefire]

I'm from Iowa.

Please don't get our hopes up like that.

Re:Embracing standards and deviating from them

[hey!]

We have to be careful about the dishonesty here.

There's nothing wrong with having things over and above, or alongside what a standard calls for. Almost everybody does this.

What is wrong is selling people a product that supposedly uses a standard but does not interoperate with that standard. That isn't just deceiving the customer it's freeloading on the know-how and goodwill that went into the standard.

I love your point...

[symbolset]

Slashdot didn't evolve into a "Microsoft sux" since you joined. It always was one. You're still here after all these years.

It's self moderated and you're right -- posts that disparage Microsoft and discount Ballmer do fly to the top of the moderation. That's not because some corporate sponsor has a geek lab in Bangalore with 1,000 blogdrones astroturfing the moderation. It's because Slashdot attracts geeks and that's what the geeks really think. That's honest opinion survey for you. I think a lot of that is because the observation that "M$ sux" actually is insightful, and the Ballmer's futile thrashing of a chair in helpless frustration over Google really is funny.

When you add that slashdot is still one of the popular sites on the intertubes you have to ask: does Microsoft have a problem?

And remember, an answer to every Microsoft problem is available all over the web.

They have to be running scared now. Vista has been out for a year and a half and OEMs are still introducing new machines that not only don't run Vista -- but never will be able to, and people are buying them up like crazy.