Microsoft-Funded Linux Studies Benefit ... Microsoft

mr.big_pig writes "The Seattle PI had a front page article analyzing the Microsoft's Get The Facts website and related ads compairing Windows to Linux. The short and sweet: follow the money and see just how 'independent' is this research. What caught my eye was that this was on the front page and not buried in the business section."

Re:Microsoft's new PR war

[SgtChaireBourne]

Well, it's largely a marketing company. For the three months ending December 2003, it spent $ 2 467 000 000 USD [sec.gov] on sales and marketing. Some of the other line items probably include some marketing activities, so that's at least $ 9 868 000 000 000 USD per year.

The gains that Linux, BSD, OS X and others have made despite this warchest is quite a testimonial as to how far behind that company's technology is.

Re:Not entirely BS

[sweede]

$300? for Windows Xp ?

you need to find a different store.

Newegg has it for $139.00
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?desc ription=37-102-143&depa=6 [newegg.com]

i can hear it now "but but you gotta buy it with hardware !!"

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?desc ription=12-102-104&depa=0 [newegg.com]

"You can use this item to satisfy any Product that has *Must be Purchased with Hardware!!* Requirement.
Free with any Microsoft Software Purchase "

Re:By your logic

[amithv]

Actually, there are some commerical companies in the US who use a modified version of what you are talking about to hawk their wares. There was a recent article [forbes.com] in Forbes about Tremor (a word of mouth group made up for teens). Would be pretty interesting if Microsoft tried something like this and if it would work. Imagine random people getting Microsoft swag in the mail, I wonder what that would do for their image

Re:True if they assume Oracle and WebLogic everywh

[johnnyb]

You've obviously never used Postgres. Postgres is in the same league as MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and others. It is not quite as tunable as Oracle, and Oracle can scale higher, but not higher enough to be in a completely different league.

Comparing PG w/ Access shows that you've never used PG. PG supports views, triggers, constraints, the ability to write functions in many languages, indexes, partial indexes, some table inheritance support, includes a genetic query optimizer, can do views of "group by" clauses (and optimizes them very well), can do updateable views, has a really nice "rules" system for rewriting queries, has write-ahead logging, support for multiple transaction isolation levels, and several other features I can't think of here.

The limitations of Postgres are: no support for configurable tablespaces, no automated point-in-time recovery (however, Oracle's PITR is quite limited, too), doesn't work with protocols requiring two-phase commits (PG uses MVCC, which uses less locking), cannot do nested transactions, and does not have a built-in automated replication solution (although third-party products and open-source projects are available).

These limitations are only problematic in the largest of deployments, however, and most of them can be worked around. The only one which would be problematic for most database apps is the lack of support for nested transactions.

"As for JBoss vs. Weblogic, i don't have enough experience with either to make a valid comparison, but Weblogic is ceratinly a much more capable product by features alone."

Actually, JBOSS has led the way in features, with Weblogic playing catch-up. I'm sure there's some things that Weblogic has that JBOSS doesn't, but most people I know who have used both prefer JBOSS.

Re:Interesting Story for the Seattle PI to Break..

[Rick the Red]

Bullshit. The Seattle Times won a Pulitzer for a series critical of the Boeing 737 rudder. Theres little love lost between the papers and Paul Allan, too, even after he bought the Seahawks. Biting the hand that feeds you is a Seattle newspaper tradition going way back. I'll bet they bitched about Denny and Yessler and Doc Maynard back in the day.

Follow the money

[guacamolefoo]

follow the money

Nothing lets you into the id of an organization or cause like seeing:

1. Where the money comes from, and
2. Where the money goes.

In the Microsoft/GNU/Linux debate, the TCO numbers highlighted on the "Get the Facts" site state that:

" A study of total costs of ownership over five years for working corporate infrastructure shows that lower staffing expenses are a large part of an 11-22% cost advantage for Windows. For file-server workloads in particular:

* Staffing expenses were 33.5% better.
* Training costs were 32.3% better."

It neglects to mention that "security" and "AV control" and "worm damage" costs are also commensurately higher.

Follow the money, boys! How much downtime did you have from the last Windows worm?

GF.

And MS Product Manager admits bogus

[burnin1965]

If you read all the way to the end of the article you will find a nice surprise.

The Microsoft product manager for Office 2003 pretty much admits that these MS funded research reports are biased and bogus.

He answered that he had been so confident in the software's benefits that it "was never going to be a question."

I guess there really isn't even a reason to do research since there is "never going to be a question" on what the outcome will be. We can just let the MS product managers point the way.

burnin