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The Continuing War Against Microsoft's "Facts" Campaign
davidmwilliams writes "I've been rallying against Microsoft's so-called 'Get the Facts' site for the last fortnight in my blog. Rather than give any legitimate comparison facing off Windows Server vs similarly spec'd Linux options, the Microsoft spin doctors opt for bunkum and hogwash with sensational headlines that don't have any substance underneath. Here's the state of play, including an update on my request to Microsoft PR to do something about the blatant lack of integrity displayed. I also go over the latest case study put up by Microsoft: they promise to show why people are choosing Windows Server 2008 over Linux using the City of Uppsala as an example."
1+(-1) = 0 /. is using MS its due to an informed decision, not some MS bull, so your not going convert anybody posting here. (maybe digg, has a few suckers who fall for MS bull) But most likely you have to buy some ads at PHB.com or preconfiguredservers.com
If we bash there lies then the two should cancel out, unfortunately
1) they're bigger than us
2) this article is preaching to the MS bashing choir, if you want to cancel out their fud you have to buy the same adspots they do, fight them were they fight. If anybody on
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
people will choose the software they feel suits their needs best. shockingly it's not always going to be linux.
Also shockingly, if they are continually fed lies without anybody disagreeing, this affects what they feel suits their needs best.
It is impossible to get support from Microsoft for a company based in India; even if one is willing to pay money. Microsoft sells Server licenses and Volume licenses and Corporate licenses; but nowhere do they sell Support for server, desktop or home software - atleast in India.
.Net based system with a completely open source, open standards compliant system. The company that develops this software provides the necessary support for Linux as well. Unlike frequent virus, service pack and other application compatibility issues on Windows - post-Vista; we are yet to face a single issue with the Linux-based solution over the past 2 years.
One has to go in for support from Microsoft partners and such, but the MCSEs who work there have little clue as to real problems faced by end users.
It thus makes a lot of sense to invest in Linux-based Open Source solutions because IT users have no use buying just Servers and Licenses - the benefit comes from the applications built on top of the servers.
At a hospital I consult with, for instance; we are replacing the entire in-house VB and
I think the "Get The Facts" page from Microsoft should be modified for each country and each industry - a general scenario makes no sense.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The whole thing is a FUD campaign. It's purpose is to be blatant, to lack any integrity, and to cause as much uncertainty and doubt as possible. Yes, that includes doubt about the integrity of MS. Any doubt is good doubt, as long as it stops people from switching to Linux.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wait a minute... you're saying people can lie on the internet in order to get me to give them money?
How will I know which male performance enhancing products and Nigerian generals to trust?
It seems you do not understand that most users have no technical understanding.
I work tech support for an OEM and if you tell someone something (for example Ill take a real world example, Vista is underpolished, buggy, has compatibility problems, networking problems, shaky drivers, as well as hogging resources)
If you tell these uneducated users that this is the case, and that Linux is perfect and works well, what do you think they are going to choose. Microsoft has been doing this to Linux since it arrived, this is why they remain a monopoly.
The customers of Microsoft are not you, you are not even important enough to be considered a Microsoft customer. Microsoft has done an amazing job of convincing non technical business people that their software is the best, and they have succeeded in tricking them very well. The only problem is that more and more people like me are spreading the truth, that Microsoft is not the end all be all, and that you have a choice in what you use. When the computing industry matures a little more, maybe we will have a fair environment where choice is supported.
It would be normal for you to "feel" that product 'X' suits you best, even though it doesn't. Yeah, I know what you mean...
Imagine them making a series of commercials that way.
Lets say... with a young, "hip" and slim actor portraying their product (A) and a older, fat, bespectacled, "corporate drone"-like actor portraying the competition (B).
And then let them play it out so that product A is not just better than B, but B also sucks. Like... you know.. big time.
Pure evil!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"A deeper point is this: do we really want to live in a world where lies and deception are regarded as the norm, and where all opinions are automatically worthless simply by virtue of their being opinions?"
It is not only that. What stands out the most is what Microsoft has decided to call this: "Get the facts". They are trying to pass it as facts, when they are, at best, opinions. At worst, marketing rethoric. It has the smell of the ministry of truth all around it.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I asked our IT dept why they hadn't moved the infrastructure to linux they had two answers. The first, boring but correct, is that for a small company (which we were) MS just integrates too easily. The second answer intrigued me though. No one in the IT dept knows ANY practical linux - it wasn't looked for on CVs or needed day-to-day. Every time the CTO questions linux, they fight against it with the REAL reason being they would be effectively demoted as skilled hires came in above them to support the new systems.
Now THAT's "suiting ones needs"
Sorry to hijack your post, I didn't RTFA but this ticked me off.
They strongly imply that you don't have to support commercial software yourself. As an aside: the fact that companies can go around making these sorts of claims and not get sued into oblivion for blatantly lying to the public (or hell, thrown in jail) says some pretty bad things about the state of our societies, IMHO.
Unless you need someone to babysit you while you do basic tasks with the software, any reasonably competent tech is going to be able to install and use the software, regardless of whether it uses arcane text files or pretty tick boxes to configure it. If you have problems, you search the 'net for it -- chances are good someone else (or a lot of someones) have already encountered and solved the problem. The only times we've ever resorted to paid support from the vendor is when we have a really unusual problem we can't diagnose or fix ourselves; and guess what? The people providing the support are themselves simply reasonably competent (if you're lucky) techs who end up being just as stumped as you.
This means that for servers and infrastructure, paid support is a fucking joke. This bodes poorly for the Open Source companies that want to make money from providing support, but that's just how it is. Maybe it'll work out different when there's actually competition: in theory, since everyone can see the internals there's nothing stopping anyone else from becoming an expert at the software, and anyone can find and fix problems in the code. So possibly for popular software there'd be enough competition to provide paid support that they'd have to be competent and actually fix things, instead of fobbing off the customer until they give up. Maybe the current state of paid support is simply a symptom of monopoly inefficiency.
But I'm not certain about that. At its essence, paid support rewards good marketing of bad software. If the software does what you say it does, does it well, and is straightforward to set up, then there's not going to be any market for support.
<rant>
We use Sharepoint 2007 at work for our websites, and the licensing ain't cheap. Over $50,000 for each internet-facing server, another $20k for SQL 2005, and a bit of change for Windows licenses to run the servers and AD (plus additional licensing for the authoring environment). But that money's just a drop in the bucket compared to the money spent on developers to customize it and training of staff.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft knows this, and that's why they're not afraid to release a half-finished product whose key features (like content deployment) don't actually work. So we spend even more money on their Premier Support service, who proceed to waste my time over the course of several months collecting gigabytes of trace files, doing repetitive "tests" and sending them the error logs (which are, of course, incomplete; seems that part's a bit broken too) and then stalling me for a while until they come up with some other pointless exercise to waste some more of my time.
I'm positive they do this deliberately, because they know that eventually I'll get fed up with getting nowhere and resign myself to working around the defects. As I have, of course. But it's ridiculous that companies can charge you for the software, and then charge you again for (no) help with its problems, and then act like you're getting fantastic value for money.
If I'm getting free support from mailing lists or forums or what have you, then I'm happy to go through all the debugging shit -- installing minimal clean environments to see if the problem is reproducible there, etcetera. It annoys me having to spend my time doing this if I'm paying for support from someone else, though. Isn't that what they're being paid to do?!
</rant>
I prefer this analogy:
"Microsoft is demonstrably the best OS in the same way that McDonald's ubiquity makes it demonstrably the best restaurant."
Popularity is a poor metric of quality.
Consider the fact that one of the main reasons holding business back from using Linux on the desktop is Exchange, which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS. Or the fact that people don't switch to OpenOffice mainly because of file formats, which have nothing to do with the quality of the software itself.
People don't switch to Linux, not because Windows is better, but because there is some critical piece of their Windows environment that they can't get on Linux (like Photoshop), or because they don't want to change their entire environment just to get the benefits of a better OS. Either way, it is resistance to change, rather than deciding on quality, that keeps people using Windows. If the tables were turned, and Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox currently had 80% market share, and Microsoft was trying to compete with Vista, MS Office and IE, nobody would be switching to them.
http://www.mhall119.com
This is nonsense, but I am not sure what kind of nonsense. The modern technological world is full of hardware, software and practices that are not optimal, or are simply stupid. The QWERTY keyboard is one of the most egregious examples: having been designed purely to sell typewriters, or slow typists down, it is an indefensible tragedy that it is the standard. Yet everyone uses it. That use does not excuse or deny it's true awfulness.
Viruses, malware, grayware and a great deal Spam owe their entire existence to the miserable and fatally flawed security model of Microsoft's Windows. This cannot be meaningfully denied. Said ailments make the average PC users daily computer experience a nightmare of inconvenience and paranoia. Yet the vast majority are forced to use it. And that has nothing to do with the quality of the product. It has to do with the monopolistic strong arm tactics that prevented meaningful competition in the PC OS space.
There is this idea that the modern capitalist ideal allows only the best products to survive and inferior products must change or disappear. This idea is mostly fiction. There are products that survive and thrive in the marketplace because they are good products, but they only serve to highlight the background noise of garbage products that owe their existence to the imbalance of the marketplace due to billions of cash bribes. Many of the these bribes are known as marketing.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
I think we're all looking at this very backwards. I use linux almost exclusively in several contexts and if there's one thing I can agree with, it's that shit is always broken. On a default ubuntu install, for example, it will throw a thousand HAL and D-BUS errors just trying to boot the system. Fedora or SUSE are no different. Common tasks take an unbelievable amount of time- information is scarce and unreliable.
Running this sort of stuff in an enterprise requires you to have a cabal of "unix people" around who have an intimate almost religious knowledge of often undocumented unix inner-workings. These people write vast hideous perl scripts that are unmaintainable and largely unholy to mangle your systems into working conditions. This is the linux sysadmin way.
I stopped using Windows because it cost money and it never broke. Nothing ever needed to be done or gone wrong. It was absolutely no fun. Even the most polished linux distribution is riddled with problems that require your care and attention. It's like a little flying machine made of hopes and dreams, and a wonderful hobby.
I believe many IT folk were once DOS people who felt underappreciated when Windows got to a more working but less tuner-oriented state. Using the worst case scenario of irresponsible desktop windows use as an excuse (the 12 year old girl's windows 98 box), they legitimized the unbelievable amounts of time needed to create their "perfect" linux box, winning a place in their hearts and minds as an inspiring hobby.
Now it's huge, it's corporate, it's competitive. So is Microsoft scrambling to keep this best kept secret quiet?
No. They're focusing on linux because they can. It means they don't have to compare Windows Server as much to Solaris, which performs fantastically in HPC operations. I can think of many examples (which I can't name unfortunately since they're not public) where major banks with servers in Chicago started migrating servers to linux from Solaris and experienced miserable performance and reliability. Linux only competes with Solaris in the front end as far as this is concerned, making it a really easy target for Microsoft. Since people view linux and unix as the same thing, Microsoft can pick off the weakest but most popular unix in the flock and provide an accurate case while goose-stepping around the reliability, security, and performance of Solaris.
By aiming more effort on linux, they can focus on its obvious amateur/scizophrenic implementation design flaws and weaknesses instead of focusing on their more serious technological competition in some commercial unices.
Design by consortium yields sub-par results, so this a battle against people who believe they can run linux servers as a non-commercial operation- that is, not paying for external support. When business folk are aware that there is no "free" option, linux is no longer on the table as a free alternative. Since they have to pay for support no matter what, now they have to consider Windows side by side by technical merit. If the shop prefers Microsoft and the CTO realizes that running linux is not really free, a sale is made. That's all Microsoft needs in some cases.
What does "best" mean? In the context of the market McDonalds targets, "best" means the optimum combination of low prices, efficient service, and food that looks, smells, and tastes consistently good. But the fact that McDonalds is more popular and more successful than any other fast-food chain does not mean that it actually scores better on any of these metrics: it just means that people think it does. In other words, we're talking about quality of marketing, not quality of product.
And it's not even a great analogy, because the fast food market is very competitive, while the computer operating system market is about as uncompetitive as they come.
People don't choose Microsoft because it's the best. People don't choose Microsoft because it costs less, or because it's more secure, or because it's more reliable, or even because it's easier to use. People choose Microsoft because it's familiar, because everyone else chooses Microsoft, because nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Most people never even get so far as evaluating alternatives or trying to decide whether or not Microsoft provides the best fit for their needs -- Windows is so ubiquitous that people simply stick with it automatically!Of course there are. The main one is that about 15 years ago Microsoft managed to achieve a situation where there was no serious alternative on the desktop, and then they leveraged the power this gave them brilliantly to entrench themselves firmly enough to become almost impossible to dislodge, however good the would-be competition becomes.
To take your fast-food analogy in a different and possibly more successful direction, the reason Microsoft dominates the desktop is pretty similar to the reason fast food is more successful than haute cuisine: the vast majority of people don't care about quality, they just want to stay in their comfort zone and stick with what they've always been used to having. Whether Linux + OpenOffice.org is better or worse than Windows is completely irrelevant: most people will reject it purely because it's different.
(The fact that you and your poor friend had trouble getting wireless to work in Ubuntu, on the other hand, is totally meaningless. I can counter that anecdote with another: I and a very IT-literate friend spent the best part of a weekend unsuccessfully trying to get wireless to work in Windows XP. Wow, now we have two opposing stories, and neither of them is a valid argument. [In fact, neither of us can even prove we're not exaggerating!] Can we drop the FUDdy silliness now and get back to rational discussion? Thanks.)
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.