*editorial note: the events described below took place in 2004<\/p>\n
So I sat with about 150 other "technical decision makers" in a very
\nplush hotel in Holborn while representatives from Microsoft tried their
\nbest to convince me that I should not be considering moving to Linux.
\nTo run the discussion Microsoft had employed a fake-tan horror who had
\nclearly escaped from daytime TV. He was by turns chummy and
\ncondescending. However being a reasonable man I will not hold Microsoft
\nresponsible for his failings.<\/p>\n
First up was Phillip Dawson who leads Linux research for
\nanalysts Meta Group. He quoted heavily from a Meta analysis which shows
\nthat Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for linux and windows is comparable.
\nThis study has been widely reported in IT press but I can't for the
\nlife of me find a link to the original. He made some interesting points
\nabout where the datacentre is going to be in a few years. His basic
\nthrust was that everyone is moving from proprietary Unix with its
\nexpensive platforms to Windows or Linux on x86 platforms and that it
\nthis hardware move, rather than linux versus windows, that will drive
\nall the cost savings. Dawson believes that in a few years the only
\nplace we will see proprietary Unix is in very large enterprise
\ndatabases.<\/p>\n
After a promising start, Dawson then got into the territory of
\nwhy Windows makes more sense for enterprises than Linux. He introduced
\nwhat was to become a running theme for seminar, Linux is not free. It
\nturns out that the TCO statements made earlier were based on the
\nlicensing costs of SuSE professional and Red Hat Enterprise versus
\nWindows. They had refused to consider that people might run a business
\non something that they could download free from the Internet. Later in
\nthe Q and A session Dawson got quite aggravated when people pointed out
\nto him that many Linux-based businesses run quite happily on free linux
\n(this was shouted by the scruffy-looking Debian hackers in the back). I
\ncan only assume that businesses that are brave enough to save thousands
\nof pounds per unit by moving away from expensive hardware platforms are
\nmeant not to care that they can save another couple of hundred pounds
\non Microsoft licence fees. Later in the presentation he said "Don't
\ncompare to the free downloads. They are not free". Precisely what he
\nmeant by this escapes me.<\/p>\n
One area the Meta study didn't look at was Linux on the
\ndesktop. Phil claimed that linux was not ready for the desktop because
\nit lacked administrative tools. He was carrying on in a similar vein
\nwhen he said "Management tools on Linux are nearly as good as a DOS
\nprompt". <\/p>\n
Nick Barley, business and Marketing Director for Microsoft UK took to
\nthe stage to baffle us with market-speak. There was lots of talk about
\nstrategy and leveraging which I didn't follow. He talked a bit about
\nMicrosoft's shared-source program and tried his hardest to make it
\nsound like open-source, mainly by refusing to say Open-source and
\ntalking about shared-source instead. Continuing in Phillip Dawson's
\nfootsteps he repeated the mantra "Linux is not free" several times.
\nAlthough he was at his best when talking about business models amongst
\nLinux distributors claiming that "Linux is moving to the same model
\nthat Microsoft has been using". <\/p>\n
My absolute favourite part of the talk was when Barley started to extol
\nthe virtues of Windows because everything in it was made by one
\nmanufacturer. A fair point which would have been well taken had he not
\ngone on to draw an idiotic analogy. He asked us to imagine an aeroplane
\nwhere different components were made by different companies. Apparently
\nhe's never heard of Airbus.<\/p>\n
Next up was Nick McGrath head of platform strategy for After a break for coffee Microsoft rolled out some satisfied The final part of the show was a Q and A session with the two \nThe overall tone of this event makes it fairly clear as to Microsoft's anti-Linux strategy.\n<\/p>\n *editorial note: the events described below took place in 2004 So I sat with about 150 other "technical decision makers" in a very plush hotel in Holborn while representatives from Microsoft tried their best to convince me that I should not be considering moving to Linux. To run the discussion Microsoft had employed a fake-tan … Continue reading Get The Facts<\/span>
\nMicrosoft UK. The main bulk of his talk was taken up by a demonstration
\nof a document sharing system based on Microsoft Sharepoint. Very boring
\nfor those of us running heterogeneous systems that Sharepoint will not
\nrun on. McGrath was much more technically clued up than Barley, and
\nseemed to be aware that the audience was not entirely on his side. He
\nmade mention of the Forrester report<\/a>
\nthat claimed more vulnerabilities in Linux than Windows. I saw this
\nthoroughly debunked by RedHat's Marc Cox when he was speaking as part
\nof RedHat's World Tour so I will not go into further detail.<\/p>\n
\ncustomers for us starting with Basil Shall of Grosvenor Group. For
\nthose of you not familiar with Grosvenor they are a financial group who
\nuse their massive London property holdings to make more money in the
\nmarkets. The most interesting thing that Basil said was that he had had
\nto write a letter to the head of Microsoft UK before he got decent
\nservice. Things got progressively less interesting as the morning wore
\non. Paul Hartigan of PharmiWeb told us how great .Net is. Anthony
\nLeaper of Seibel told us how great siebel is and how it runs just fine
\non windows. Colin Bradford of Computacenter didn't really tell us
\nanything about Microsoft but did do an effective job of plugging
\nComputacenter's new testing facility where you can get suppliers to
\nshow you real working systems of their latest and greatest
\ntechnologies.<\/p>\n
\nNicks, Philip Dawson and Colin Bradford chaired by the aforemention
\ndaytime TV horror-show. Eddie Bleasdale of Netproject<\/a>
\nasked the most insightful question. He talked about a customer of his
\nwho had lost data because it was in old Microsoft file formats that
\ncouldn't be read by current Microsoft products. This was slickly dealt
\nwith by McGrath who suggested that he should get the Microsoft people
\nto talk to him after the show. Barley added that all the current
\nMicrosoft Office file formats including their XML schema are published
\nopenly. I'm not entirely convinced of that but I don't know enough
\nabout XML to make any definitive statements. <\/p>\n\n