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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."
people will choose the software they feel suits their needs best. shockingly it's not always going to be linux.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Doesn't anybody read H. L. Mencken anymore?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Nothing against a well founded unbiased comparison of different products. But your article already starts off stating that it is purposefully against one of the options. Why should this be any better than the Microsoft press department gibberish?
As someone who lived and studied in Uppsala and has worked in several places in the public sector in Sweden, I can tell you that there are LOTS of Pointy Haired Bosses and sysadmins theres who are unabashedly Microsoft-philes.
The bosses because they all they know how to use is MS Office and they demand Outlook integration so they can book meetings and keep tabs on employees. Sysadmins because they are often self-taught (from magazines such as Datormagazin and they feel threatened whenever someone suggests using something other than Windows.
Sadly many Swedish universites are in the process of switching to AD.
"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.
Not defending Microsoft, but decrying them using the same tactics you are admonishing them for using probably won't win you any followers that weren't on your side to begin with.
Monstar L
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....
i just spotted a "Get the facts" google adsense text block at the top of the page, rofl!
You mean to say that a sales and marketing website is manipulating the facts in order to show their product in a better light than competing products?
I am honestly shocked! I commend you on your campaign and congratulate you on your inevitable victory. Microsoft can do nothing but shamefacedly admit their blatant bias here and comply with your demands.
That Microsoft site is even more disorganized than the Windows control panel or the .NET documentation.
I think nobody is going to dig through that mess to help them make a decision. The only people who are going to bother with that are Microsoft fanboys trying to justify their OS with "data".
No, but I hear third time's a charm.
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
I would think that a company intentionally spreading misleading information under the guise of facts would be illegal, if only so as to protect consumers. How is this not so?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It's really just that FUD. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/ On the upper right is a search field, search for "FUD" - the first or second hit should help you out ;)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you read the article, there was no comparison done. The decision was outsourced to MS resellers who, surprise, peddled more MS wares. Comparison of other technologies never happened.
Oh, that and MS Sweden couldn't be bothered to look up any of the dozens of regional companies that provide support for non-MS systems and packages. That 'no support' argument worked in the early 1990's but not anymore.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Because the "facts" can be proven.
Remember Linux comes in many flavors Microsoft get to pick and choose.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
After years of study I feel only one voice has summed up this entire academic discipline:
Tyler Durden: "Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
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Linux is an operating system, and a very good one at that, but please treat everyone else like adults who are capable of making their own minds up as to what OS they want to run. Fine, if they choose not to consider Linux then so be it, let it be their loss but let them get on with it.
Unless you are fighting for open file standards (so Linux can interoperate on par with Windows) or pushing back on DRM, you will do more harm than good to Linux and the Open Source movement because you will appear as nothing more than a religious zealot.
It's quite clear that recently, Microsoft is quite capable of putting its own foot in its mouth without your assistance.
So I would strongly suggest your energies would be put to better use giving assistance to those who have just started to explore Linux - help them along with it, make their experience with it easier & firmly dissuade them from any thoughts that Linux people are not lunatic hippies but actually nice helpful people.
Linux exists DESPITE Microsoft, not BECAUSE of Microsoft and it will still be here in years to come whether Microsoft is here or not.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
>> Two wrongs don't make a right... or do they?
No, but three lefts do.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
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"
I say pish-posh to that!
/Mike
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
I've posted about this before, but if you buy Windows you don't know what support you're going to get. When we installed our first Windows domain servers we bought two servers and enough client licenses for our user base, and it was good. Then we upgraded from NT 3.1 to NT 3.51 and we started getting users kicked out because we didn't have enough licenses. So we called Microsoft, and they told us to make some changes to our license settings, and we did that, and EVERYONE started getting kicked out. Nobody could log in to the domain. So we called Microsoft back and they said, oh no, we'd used up the three free support calls, now we had to get a support contract, they were sorry that it was their fault they'd made things worse but they couldn't do anything about that... policy was policy, even if our whole domain was broken...
So I asked on Usenet, got the right answer, and everything was working fine the next week when someone more senior from Microsoft called VERY apologetically and saying they'd reset our calls. For all I know they're still waiting for me to make 'em... because since then I've gone for the free "you don't know what you're going to get" support FIRST and it's always come through.
This means YOU.
I've been a linux user for 6 years and I can't stand microsoft, but what they're is doing is not wrong, it's marketing. This is what companies do! That's how they sell their product. As a business owner myself, I'm all too familiar with the desire to do anything to sell your product. The OP's reaction is the correct one. Microsoft has every right try and sell their products.... the only thing the linux camp can do is fight back with the same tactics.
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
If you can prove that it is fraud, I will join your class-action suit. I just don't see it as fraud when the attempt at FUD is so blatantly obvious.
The game.
Product B really does suck.
you had me at #!
"I'm no fan of Microsoft, but [MS bashing is outdated]."
Sorry, it's not outdated. They are a criminal bunch of liars and thieves who need to be shut down for the sake of civilisation.
Once that has been concluded: Bashing Microshit will be done only as a quiant ceremonial gesture when the winning side wishes to celebrate past victories in the great war to save technology from pure sick greed!
In a couple of generations nobody will remember who Microsoft was, or if they do, only for what it truly is: an embarrassing and incalculably costly stain on the history of technology.
you had me at #!
You see Linux is a tool, it's cost and functionality is a competitive advantage. While Company
A is stroking million dollar licensing checks each year Company B is running Linux. Company
B is placing that million dollars into sales, marketing, equipment etc to put a hurting on company A's market share. I guess company B hopes you continue running windows.
Got Code?
I do prefer Linux because well, I do... but, honesty demands a few good look at everything.
If we're going to get into, yet again, a tired debate about Windows vs Linux, let's challenge some basic "truths" about Windows circulated in the Linux community. A lot of these basic "truths" are circulated about older versions of Windows...
1. Windows is unreliable. Not true. Any more, Windows Server is very reliable. IT departments in a number of my clients run Windows Server 2003 and can keep it up for years, if they want. I think it has been about five years since any Windows server I have seen has ever crashed.
2. Windows isn't multiuser friendly. Not true. I know one guy who started an ISP, threw up a bunch of Windows servers and gave all of his customers unfettered access to their own SQL Server databases. I thought he was crazy. But, now he's a millionaire and his business is well regarded. In the enterprise scale, I've got multiple people connecting to Windows databases via RDP, and honestly, this setup makes VNC look like crap. Windows terminal services works so extraordinarily well that outsourced development teams in India are using RDP to run Visual Studio on US hosted boxes.
3. SQL Server sucks. Not True. I think that was a pretty accurate claim up till around 7.0, but starting around SQL Server 2000, you could make a pretty good case for SQL Server 2000 for a lot of medium sized businesses and medium sized datasets. I've seen SQL Server instances running with terabytes of real row data (not just tons of images) and it holds up like a champ. Law firms, power companies, people that have big data, are using SQL Server and it works for them pretty well.
4. IIS Sucks. Not true. I'm not a real big fan of ASP.NET, but, its working pretty well for a lot of people and keeps me employed. It has its hiccups, but, for the most part, if you build an application in ASP.NET and know -something-, the IIS/SQL Server/Windows Server stack is actually going to be there for your more than it will let you down.
Of course, that's not to say Microsoft is perfect. They aren't. Internet Explorer STILL sucks, Word sucks (but MS Office still blows Open Office out of the water), the help in Visual Studio is just terrible any more, and there's a lot to not like about how Visual Studio manages projects and solutions. But, going around and saying that "everything Microsoft makes sucks", isn't true, and honestly, it never has been. For a lot of customers, a lot of the time, they have actually succeeded because they offer a better product.
This is my sig.
In some particular programming language, perhaps.
More generally, however, the GPP is correct.
In first order predicate calculus, and also in propositional calculi, and at least half a dozen other logical formalisms, a negated negation is an assertion. It's called 'principium tertii exclusi' and is present in most western logics (although, interestingly, not in many classical bhuddist logics).
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Right, I'm hijacking this troll to get eyeballs. Let's all post anecdotes about our funny/stupid bosses.
So we have this website, and a few Sundays ago the database that drives it fell over. It was around 1.30am. Around 11.30pm just before going to bed I decided to check my work email, just in case there was anything I needed to know for Monday. Turns out I needed to know our website was down all day. Of course, I have Nagios monitoring this, but since it was a weekend I didn't check my work email and never knew.
We happened to have a meeting the next day, so I mentioned that the site had been down for nearly 24 hours. Naturally nobody knew, because it was on a Sunday. So I said I wanted to get a GSM modem so I could receive SMS notification if important things went South, and after assuring the boss it'd only be a few hundred dollars he said okay.
Later a colleague (who was going to actually get quotes and buy it) told me he'd been asked to defer it. We had security auditors coming in soon, and the boss wanted to get their okay, because he thought it was a security risk. Bit strange I thought, but fair enough; we're hooking a wireless modem up to a server on our internal network, I can see how that can be perceived as a risk. Easy enough to explain how it wouldn't be possible to access the server using it.
But no, that wasn't the risk. The risk was we were using Nagios. It's open source!, he says. Doesn't that mean it's less secure?
Wow. Just wow. I'm disappointed I heard this 2nd hand, otherwise I would've been in there with a "1998 called; they want their FUD back". He might not have understood, but it would've amused me a great deal. And that's what matters, after all.
So it just goes to show there are still people buying the Microsoft-styled spin hook, line and sinker. I sure hope he doesn't discover the Brocade SAN switch we use runs Linux. Or our ESX servers. He might have a heart attack or something. Maybe it's okay if there's some proprietary code on it, though?
Bonus anecdote: my colleague also wanted to get pricing on sides for the racks in our server room, in order to improve airflow (they're completely open at the moment). The same boss said we don't need them, because hot air won't be coming out the back of the servers. It appears our boss feels that if cold air goes in the front, then cold air ought to come out the back. Sadly my colleague was too awed by this to press further, so we'll probably never know the full thought process behind this.
You didn't RTFA, did you? The whole point is that Microsoft is promising a comparison of Windows vs. Linux and then pointing to studies which don't do that. One example study was only comparing a new version of Windows against an older version of Windows (typical Microsoft marketing). The other study was about a replacement of a network environment, which was mostly Windows but had a few Linux and Novell servers, with an all-Windows environment. They got some benefit from the conversion but that's no surprise because replaced very old versions of Windows with newer ones. For the Linux and Novell servers, they didn't even consider the possibility of upgrading them with newer versions of Linux. There was no bid from a Linux vendor to compare to.
Also, market share numbers are often fudged by technology companies, especially Microsoft. I recall one particularly silly ppt slide MS reps used to trot out that showed NT marketshare in the mid-'90s, when Novell Netware was the dominant competitor to NT. I worked for a PC distributor at the time, and every so often a MS rep would come in to feed us some kool-aid. The slide in question showed a bar graph with 3 vertical bars. The tallest bar was NT shipments from a particular time frame. The next, slightly shorter bar was Novell Netware 4.x shipments from the same period, and the third bar was Novell Netware 3.x. The Microsoft dog-and-pony expert would point proudly at the graph, explaining that it showed Microsoft's market dominance, despite the fact that the aggregate Novell NW 3.x + 4.x totals were substantially greater than NT.
I can also recall being told by management (same distributor) to ship at least 1 CAL with every order, for free if need be - whether it was ordered or not. Why? To artificially boost numbers of NT seats shipped. No matter what attempted "spin" you use, it still doesn't [...] unseat Windows as the most used [...] up to Enterprise Class/Mission Critical systems... I won't dispute the numbers in the home/desktop/small-to-mid server arenas (although, like I said, numbers aren't everything). I call BS on the enterprise/mission-critical stuff, though. Windows is still trying to make inroads into the mainframe/high end UNIX world. I'd argue that through the efforts of IBM and others, Linux can run better on higher-end gear than Windows.
I'm not saying you can't like MS products for whatever reason you see fit. But this isn't high school anymore. Popularity isn't everything.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
and he wants credit for his personally-paid chroniclers. Heck, Hammurabi called too.
Marketing is as old as mankind. I bet Grog was selling stone wheels out of his cave with FUD.
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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.
Could you point out some specific features or functionality that a new version of Linux on the server would provide, that is an advantage over the old versions of Linux or even over older versions of Windows Server? In a computerworld.com article just a couple of weeks ago, Ubuntu's server was trumpeted as having the key new features of two virtualization environments and a greater number of ISV certifications for enterprise software that is certified for Ubuntu server. Not a lot to hang your hat on.
I think the point that MS is making is that they are actually developing new features into the new server software that provide additional functionality for businesses, considering not just the server OS but also application servers. Remember they are not only selling to convert Novell and Linux servers to Windows, they are also trying to sell upgrades of their own OS, and for legitimate functional reasons.
where previously, they would compare their finely tuned stuff to either old Linux stuff, some IBM mainframe running Linux, untuned or detuned Linux stuff. But now, they don't do any of those nasty kinds of things. They've changed and this is the new Microsoft. The open source friendly Microsoft.
Made me laugh when the guy said he'd contacted Microsoft's PR company about these. As if they care. What they care about is if the deception is working. IMO
LoB
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