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Microsoft Asks Open Source Not to Focus On Price
Microsoft's supposed open-source guru Sam Ramji has asked open-source vendors to focus on "value" instead of "cost" with respect to competition with Microsoft products. This is especially funny given the Redmond giant's recent "Apple Tax" message. "While I'm sure Ramji meant well, I'm equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM."
and for open source, the price point is zero.
Not always. Especially if you factor in support contracts or the average salary of someone who actually knows how to administer the software in an effective manner. Open Source does not equal free beer. Just ask Stallman. However, if you write a good open source program I may buy you a free beer.
Since the article mentions Microsoft's attempts to undermine competing businesses, here's an interesting link to the Eupean Committee for Interoperable Systems' (ECIS) article "Microsoft: A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm" (PDF): http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf Published on 2009-03-31. Required reading. :-)
You can always find a better quality solution if you're willing to pay enough, but as value is roughly modeled as utility/cost, with utility including quality, and cost including both monetary value as well as time and incidental costs (like training) your value will tend to plummet as your costs go up even if your quality goes up as well. Ironically Open Source tends to have better value specifically because of its cost even if the quality is often somewhat less than commercial offerings (not talking code quality here, but rather design and interface quality).
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
That quote from Ramji was taken completely out of context. It takes a bit of digging, because the distortion is already present in TFA, but here is the blog post to which TFA "responds". Note especially:
Due to the downturn in the economy, many business users are putting the kibosh on migrations to or from open source. [...] That's why Microsoft is advising open-source partners with whom the company is collaborating not to focus their customer pitches on costs, but instead to lead their sales pitches with "value," he said.
(Emphasis mine.)
Now this may certainly be bad and self-serving advice from Microsoft, but it is still very different from what TFA makes it out to be. Microsoft isn't begging OS vendors to change their sales pitches to something it can compete with. It's telling vendors how it thinks they should pitch in a time of economic difficulty.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Microsoft bashing.
Pay attention to the source before going off the deep end:
IT departments are not cutting their spending to zero, Ramji claimed. Instead, they are focusing on strategic projects and cutting completely those they deem to be non-critical. That's why Microsoft is advising open-source partners with whom the company is collaborating not to focus their customer pitches on costs, but instead to lead their sales pitches with "value," he said.
The message is for Microsoft's open-source allies, not RedHat. Ramji is suggesting that they fish where the fish are. It's good advice.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If you want support, you can get StarOffice for $80.
I'm a network admin in a shop that uses both open and closed source products. Most of our servers run Linux, and most of the services we run are open source, as well (postfix, lighttpd, bind-9, Samba, etc.). We do have a couple of Windows servers, and we also run MS-SQL for our billing system (another closed source product).
In my experience at this job, it is far, far easier to find solutions for the problems we've faced for our open-source software on Google than it is to find solutions for the problems we've faced on our proprietary systems. With open source software, chances are someone with enough coding skills to troubleshoot the software has already encountered the problem and has posted a fix. With proprietary systems, you can sometimes find a solution, but not always. In that case, your only solution is to contact the vendor...and nine times out of ten, they don't have any more clue than I or the other network admin do.
YMMV, but I'll gladly take open source and Google over a proprietary product any day of the week.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
You would be right, and you kind of are, except that this guy is the Director of Microsoft's OSS Lab, which means its not just one employee's opinion, because in a position like that you speak for, I dunno, the branch of the company you represent. If it was just some regular-ol'-coder for M$ ablogging away, then it wouldn't carry enough weight for a story on /. (not that you need THAT much weight here...), but it didn't, it came from the Director of MS OSS Labs, and that kind of talk means that even if it is his opinion, its one that he has now made the opinion of said labs.