Rick Moen Debunks Gartner Myths

An anonymous reader sent us a bit where Rick Moen speaks about the recent Linux Myths thing that has raise MS once again to the top of everyone's "People We Love" list. Its a good summary piece that pretty much explains how valid the Gartner Report was.

Comments

Webbed fingers?

[DrSpoo]

One is moved to ask, in a spirit of genuine concern: Doesn't incest on this scale tend to lead to problems like webbed fingers in future generations?

Ah, webbed fingers aren't necessarily caused by incest AFAIK. Lots of people have webbed fingers and toes, and they don't all have circus jobs either. So regardless if the point of the artical was factually correct or not, it isn't right to stereotype people who are different from you. As Linux users (a minority, but growing fast) we should be fully aware of such issues.

Lets celebrate diversity for the more aquaticly gifted amoung us!

Hmm. Seems to have taken on a life of its own

[rickmoen]

[Cross-posting from the SVLUG mailing list]
Quoting Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com):

> Nice commentary, Rick. Turns out you made Slashdot with this.

I noticed. Wow. (I did not post it there, only here on the SVLUG list.)

It was never intended as a serious-minded analysis: I didn't think the "report" merited one. To the contrary, I was just having fun with some of the delicious absurdities to be found in it, in Gartner Group's hilariously cozy relationship with Microsoft (and perhaps anyone else whose cash is green enough), and in Gartner Australia's "explanation".

I'm sure the latter was truthful, if you squint at it the right way: I'm certain that Microsoft Corporation's ongoing series of cheques for sundry services and accomodations did not specify (outright) that they were to fund a report that just by amazing coicidence parrots Microsoft's exact party line about Linux, in fine detail.

So, I'm sure the apparent incestuousness of all this is mere coincidence, and nothing the least bit improper or damaging to Gartner Group's reputation for independence.

[cough]

Anyhow, the point wasn't to "debunk" Gartner's Linux piece du jour, but rather to mock it. It's not important, just amusing. I'm far more concerned about poor Hemos and his ruined house, poor guy.

Re:The problem with branding ...

[LeBleu]

let's face it, the existance of rather spotty quality free/shareware has tarnished the origins of GNU/OpenSource..

You should judge software on the basis of it's latest release.. not previous mistakes.

Reading your post, it seems to me that you misunderstand the reference you quoted. Freeware/shareware has nothing to do with the previous mistakes of GNU/OpenSource/"Free Software"(as defined by RMS)

Perhaps you're not familiar with it, but in the DOS/Windoze world, there is tons of software available gratis(free), frequently with a rarely obeyed stipulation that if you like it and use it you should pay for it, which is almost always closed source. I do believe that this is what the previous poster was referring to. Freeware and shareware tend to combine all the disadvantages of proprietary/closed source software with all the disadvantages of GNU/OpenSource software. You don't get the source, so you can't fix it yourself, but there is no support, and since the people who write it barely make any money off it anyway, they don't spend much time fixing it. Some of it still manages to be pretty good, but a lot of it is crap. (hence the "spotty quality" comment)

P.S. Personally, I think we should avoid the confusing terms "open source" (which only implies that the source is open, not that you can get the source for free even necessarily) and "free software"(which sounds more like gratis than libre in english). My current favorite term is "free source", which can be interpreted correctly with both interpretations of "free", but doen't *necessarily* imply that as a product it's free. (Hell, they can sell bottled water;) I do have to wonder though if a term like "liberated software" or something like that would be good, avoiding the gratis interpretation. However, I'm rambling, so I'll shut up now

Sure it can!

[Black Parrot]

> also heard it can't work with burned CPUs and crashed harddisks. And it won't display things on monitors with broken glass!

Since society seems to accept vapourware as standard practice in the industry, I suggest that we start promising these things for the 3.0 kernel.

Indeed, we should promise to eliminate the need for memory and disks altogether, by putting everything on a RAM disk in virtual memory, and then moving the swap file to the RAM disk. (Too late for a patent: I think they already do this to make infinite memory available in the OS's Moebiux and Klinix.)

--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?

Gartner Group = Corporate Whores

[the eric conspiracy]

This is the same group of 'consultants' that has done a number of reports on user productivity and cost of ownership funded by Apple in order to show Windows to be inferior.

These outfits have zero credibility. They are not independent, they always write what the client wants to hear in hopes of getting more work of the same nature in the future,

From the newswire

[Zoltar]

AP - 10/16/1999 Microsoft Purchases ALL Public Broadcasting Stations.

Microsoft has reported today that they have just closed a deal to purchase every Public Broadcasting Station in the free world for an undisclosed amount of money. Bill Gates speaking via video conference had this to say: "We are very exicted to announce this bold move into world of non-profit organizations. I have always been more interested in helping people than making money and I feel this will finally prove this to everyone. Americans have always said that they want more access to quality shows on TV and now we can offer help to them by providing the shows that they want to see!"

PBS will now be known as MSPBS and will be run by the former CEOs of Mindcraft and the Gartner Group. Some of the new shows to debut this winter will be:

Cooking with Bill: Watch Bill Gates make food with recipies stored on Win98.

Wild Kingdom : See young people survive in the jungle with nothing but their Windows CE devices.

Financial News Nightly: See how all of the terrrific innovations by Microsoft causes their stock to raise on a daily basis.


In an unrelated announcement Microsoft has changed the name of their new OS from Win2000 to Bob2000. Bill Gates was quoted as saying: "We really feel the name change will help our customers be more productive."

Re:Amazing

[sphere]

I agree with witz. If you take a careful look at the actual Gartner Group report here, you'll see that this report isn't really "anti-Linux propaganda." They simply believe that Linux won't replace Windows as the most-used desktop OS in the land (at least by 2004 the way that Linux is currently going).

IMHO, and this is not intended as a flame, this whole tempest-in-a-teapot was blown up by ComputerWorld journalist Ellen Cresswell. She says that Gartner "painted an unflattering picture of Linux" in their report when the actual report isn't really that critical on Linux, It simply raises issues that have been discussed on Slashdot as real live problems with Linux. But Cresswell blew up this report as Gartner's "slam" on Linux when the report wasn't any such thing. Let's not let Cresswell benefit from a useless and pointless flamewar between Gartner and the Linux community.

And even though Gartner obviously has substantial reservations about the success of Linux in the mainstream (if you thought the desktop OS report was bad, check this Gartner server-oriented Linux report out), we shouldn't flame them. Instead we should prove them wrong, right?

So let's prove them wrong!

Rob Thornton

Re:Mythosoft

[Jules Agee]

People just haven't realized yet that none of these "objective" tech review groups have any reason to be truly objective. They claim objectivity, but there is no one holding them to it. The average PHB doesn't investigate the findings, and the money goes to whoever can consistently provide the best combination of perceived integrity and customer butt-kissing.

For example, in Microsoft's Linux Myths page, one of the key points is lower TCO. The study they quote to back this up was paid for by Microsoft and Compaq, and is seriously funny if you actually add up the numbers. The study is actually a comparison of NT TCO with Solaris/SPARC TCO, so since they use this "study" in an argument against Linux, I thought it would be appropriate to look at the numbers as they would appear in a Linux environment.

First of all, on every line, they compare the TCO of 30 NT servers to 38 Unix servers. Why? They don't say. In the absence of convincing evidence that 30 NT servers will do the job of 38 Unix servers, let's make this a server-to-server comparison and use numbers for 30 Unix servers instead. Let's assume the hardware costs are the same between NT and Linux, since they will both run on Intel hardware. That saves us big bucks over the Sparc hardware quoted in the study.

Now, for additional software, they include databases, development tools, apps, and utilities. Top quality Linux apps, dev tools, and utilities are free, but I could see paying money for Oracle or something on big boxes (no disrespect to MySql intended), so we'll include their figures for database expenditures, minus 21% to account for 30 servers instead of 38.

The initial purchase price and application prices I list below are double what are shown on the "TCO Summary" table on their web page. For some reason their summary figures are exactly half of the totals in their detail reports, and I couldn't determine why, so I went with the detail report. All the other summary figures on their page match their detail reports exactly.

All the support etc... stuff will probably be about the same between Solaris and Linux, so I just took those numbers right off their page.

............................................NT.. ..........Linux
Hardware+OS.....$684,980......$530,400
Applications...........$49,510.........$32,307
Support, etc..........$867,740...$1,035,496
TCO/Year.........$1,602,230...$1,598,203

So, even in their own study, Microsoft couldn't beat Linux in TCO. What Microsoft paid for was for BRG research to arrange the data in a way that complimented NT, even if they had to "fudge" the data. Imagine what the numbers would look like in a study the FSF paid for!

______________________________________________

Auditing and dentistry are excellent career choices for people who don't

Hiding Out in the Information Age

[Skyshadow]

Don't blame Microsoft's PR department; this sort of thing really did used to work, and it used to be used by companies all the time. So it won't work against Linux; they just haven't realized it yet. It's like in the Civil War: None of the generals knew that their tactics were out of date compared to the weapons they were using, and some hadn't learned that by the end of the war (with disasterous consequences for their commands).

Mindcraft, Gartner and any other company that bases its business on its rep with the business community need to learn right now that you can't fool 100,000 pairs of eyeballs, no matter how hard you try to distract them, nor can you outshout 100,000 angry mouths yelling against you. They simply can't afford to pull this "We do a report for you that says exactly what you want it to say and you pays us" crap (which is exactly what they both did, its just that Mindcraft got paid before and Gartner got paid after).

The 100,000 brains out there are ripping this report to shreads, and 100,000 coworkers are talking about how the Gartner Group sold out to Microsoft. Gartner is, in a word, fucked; any second-year advertising major can tell you that word-of-mouth is the most incredibly powerful force for or against a company that exists.

Gartner made the mistake of letting MS use them to use a tactic that's out of date in the information age. The only question is how many more generals out there have yet to realize that their tactics are out of date, and how many more companies will have their reputation destroyed before this is over.

----

I'm not sure I buy this

[Otter]

I admit I didn't bother to plow through all the links to the original /. post, but since this has turned into "All The President's Men", let's take a closer look at the conspiracy theory:

So, we're to believe that:
-- Gartner Group wrote it all, despite what the small-type notice (quoted earlier) says in direct contradiction.

Maybe I'm confused, but isn't all of this (the URL and the notice) pertaining to the "Webletter", not the original report?

-- We're to understand that a set of URLs on www.gartner.com are "the Microsoft site".

It's ComputerWorld that used those words, not Gartner. Not that they're necessarily wrong.

-- Microsoft "sponsors" this "site", and paid unspecified fees to Gartner Group related to the content, but in no way did Microsoft fund the study.

Again, I don't think this "site" or "content" is the "study".

In any case, I think people are missing the biggest offender here -- ComputerWorld, which took a report criticizing Linux as a business desktop and turned that into "A damning report from Gartner has all but put the kiss of death on Linux."

Mythosoft

[Signal 11]

Hasn't anybody told Microsoft yet that Linux itself is a myth? It really doesn't exist.. we're just trying to get your goat. I mean... system uptime measured in years? High performance out of desktop computers? You'd have to be pretty gullible to believe all that. And to top it off, an operating system that doubles in functionality while increasing it's speed by a similar amount at every major release? Absolutely unbelieveable! Programmers who devote their free time to giving away their code? I can barely contain myself.. I really must go...

--

The problem with branding ...

[LL]

... is that ultimately it appeals to the emotions, whether the safety of the pack or reinforcing existing prejudices (let's face it, the existance of rather spotty quality free/shareware has tarnished the origins of GNU/OpenSource). The marketing concept of the "Big Lie" (repeat anything long enough and people will believe it) probably offends engineers' sense of asethetics, being trained to think logically and applying careful principles to evaluate physical properties. Unfortunately, how do you measure two complex pieces of software? Function points (ie bells and whistles) are easy to count but who measures subtle factors like quality, support, and reliability? As they say, a leaky tap gets the attention whereas something designed to work correctly the first time is not noticed. The lack of marketing oomph outside word-of-mouth is a somewhat mixed blessing as unless people are aware of alternatives, they cannot have free choice, especially given inherent biases in some trade journals. Perhaps one way of redressing the balance is for every piece of OpenSource software available for public release (ie not beta) have 3 sets of numbers associated with it.

1. cost to repair/replace
   
2. estimated useful product lifecycle
   
3. mean time between failure/update
   

giving a rule of thumb purchase price + (1) * (2) / (3) lifetime cost. Perhaps other /.ers can suggest metrics for giving consumers a better feel for what the real cost of software really is beyond the initial marked price. In particular, people should be aware of the switching costs as given the rapid pace ot technology, something better always comes along. This is true regardless of whether it is OpenSource or Commercial. The only way to combat FUD is to provide independently validated information which the consumers can then use to make up their own minds as to the value and stability of whatever software goods they are purchasing.

All brand and no beef makes for very skimpy meal.

LL

Amazing

[witz]

How so much misinformation can lead to so much knee-jerk reactivity.
Gartner writes reports for companies on a subscription basis. IE PAID. The company I work for, for example, pays Gartner for consulting and reports. The "webletter" on the Gartner site is a paid Microsoft publication of the original Gartner report, it is NOT the actual Gartner report. MS did not pay Gartner to trash Linux, they paid Gartner for the ability to post the Gartner report on Linux on their site.
If you people would actually READ the report, instead of that idiotic summation by IDG and the Microsoft produced webletter, you'd realize that it isn't that big of a rip on Linux. It simply criticizes the *current* state of Linux as a viable desktop solution. It applauds what Linux is doing in other areas.
Sheesh. Stop the zealotry and start to look at things with a *calm* and objective eye.

Credibility of Analysis/Credulity of Readers

[Technik~]

Sidestepping the matter of ComputerWorld putting its own spin on the report, what is the credibility of Gartner, Giga, etc. in the IT industry? The second question is who is their target audience?

These analysis groups have a deservedly bad reputation among IS/IT staff for the same reason that the national news reports lack accuracy when one is personally familiar with the event: the author is too far from the subject matter to do it justice and the readership doesn't demand more. Ask anyone who does the "heavy lifting" in an IT shop about one of these reports. If they are more than vaguely knowledgeable about the subject they can pick the report apart. Now try the same thing with upper management. Funny how the response is different.

These groups make their living producing, despite their claims, shallow analysis for a readership that needs information quickly so that they can become "instant experts" before the next meeting. Depth is not necessary, technical accuracy obfuscates, just get the gist and make it readable. The topic of the week is always on the horizon and this must be put into the readership's hands fast. Odds are good that the information will be lost or forgotten (for a chuckle, go back and read last year's reports and predictions).

I know I've said it before, but these companies have a track record for post-prediction and a habit of ignoring their misses that makes psychics look good. Worse, I personally know a few people who work for these companies and I can only say that I was glad to see such people leave.