If you get Windoze Inc and Office/IE/Visual Inc, then there's no incentive for OEM's like Compaq to push Office since it won't count for their volume-discount on Windoze licensing, and Corel and Staroffice have a chance to get(back) into the market. If Windoze Inc no longer owns IE, they can't threaten to pull an OEM's O/S preload license if they load Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, etc. on the desktop. If the O/S developers and the Office developers aren't sitting 10 ft apart anymore, there won't be any use of undocumented APIs that Corel/StarOffice/SmartSuite etc. don't know about. If there's no tie between Visual Whatever and Windoze, or Office and Windoze, there's a better chance of them finally making the tools cross-platform. And if there isn't a Redmond gorilla to subsidize Expedia/Carpoint/MSNBC, can they honestly compete on their own against Travelocity, autobytel, Drudge:-)
Mindcraft says in the report that they had Microsoft's help in tuning the NT box, but that they got no help in tuning the Linux box. Others have said the Linux box was in fact 'de-tuned' from the out-of-the-box settings, which further worsened performance.
If that isn't skewing the test in NT's favor, what is? Other reviewers have done side-by-side compares with 'vanilla' installs, and in those cases Linux blows NT away. Let's write off Mindcraft as Microsoft PR, and try and get some more 'real-life' performance comparsions...
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If you get Windoze Inc and Office/IE/Visual Inc, then there's no incentive for OEM's like Compaq to push Office since it won't count for their volume-discount on Windoze licensing, and Corel and Staroffice have a chance to get(back) into the market. If Windoze Inc no longer owns IE, they can't threaten to pull an OEM's O/S preload license if they load Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Lynx, etc. on the desktop. If the O/S developers and the Office developers aren't sitting 10 ft apart anymore, there won't be any use of undocumented APIs that Corel/StarOffice/SmartSuite etc. don't know about. If there's no tie between Visual Whatever and Windoze, or Office and Windoze, there's a better chance of them finally making the tools cross-platform. And if there isn't a Redmond gorilla to subsidize Expedia/Carpoint/MSNBC, can they honestly compete on their own against Travelocity, autobytel, Drudge :-)
Mindcraft says in the report that they had Microsoft's help in tuning the NT box, but that they got no help in tuning the Linux box. Others have said the Linux box was in fact 'de-tuned' from the out-of-the-box settings, which further worsened performance.
If that isn't skewing the test in NT's favor, what is? Other reviewers have done side-by-side compares with 'vanilla' installs, and in those cases Linux blows NT away. Let's write off Mindcraft as Microsoft PR, and try and get some more 'real-life' performance comparsions...