[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 23:01:41 +0000 Grant Sewell wrote:
Touché! I've not listened to them yet (in the process of downloading now), but I wonder if it'll be as unbiased as the "Get The Facts" campaign. Grant.
I've just got the WMA and the transcript. Some priceless things in there. Ok, this is quite long. My digest of the transcript. I've quoted quite a lot, BTW.
"Hi, I'm Martin Taylor ... As General Manager of Platform Strategy, I'm responsible for ensuring that our customers understand the benefits of the Microsoft platform."
So, an unbiased perspective here, then.
"I frequently spend time with a good section of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 customers ... there are a few things that I normally have to talk about that might be top-of-mind for them. One thing that normally comes up is that Microsoft is anti-open source ... This is definitely not the case."
Next he'll tell us that black is white.
"If you look at some of the dual licensing models taken on by products such as MySQL, or the dual licensing model of OpenOffice.org"
I was under the impression that OOo was not under dual-licensing at all. StarOffice, which is what I believe he's talking about, is a different product is it not? Perhaps if he'd use QT as an example it'd show that he had researched a little.
"Microsoft spends a lot of time to ensure that our products both work well together as well as they work well in heterogeneous environments."
Hmm... my jury is out on that one! I wasn't aware of Microsoft doing very much at all to ensure their products work in a heterogeneous environment. Unless, that is, they mean heterogeneous in a homogeneous kind of way :p
"We talked to-here in the U.S.-about 800 IT professionals to ask them some deep questions around interoperability."
Big study then?
"As I talk to customers around the world, one thing that becomes increasingly true is ... they really want to deploy what we call a commercialized distribution. I always ask the question of customers and yes, there's always a free version, there's Debian ... but when you really want to deploy it in a mission-critical way, when you really want to have something that's broader from an infrastructure perspective, they want something that has support, they want something that has some level of, lets' say, consistency [from] platform to platform"
And, of course, Windows is available for all major platforms and many minor ones. Can I hear Mr Ford? "You can have it in any colour, so long as it's black."
"Understanding what a distribution is, is the first step and again the context here is a commercial Linux distribution. ... Commercial distribution is a collection of open-source software packages ... there's 1,000, 1400, 1500 packages on any of the more recent commercial Linux distributions. ... And what they're really selling is support, because again it's not their software, it's software from the open-source space. ... So what you're buying then, at the end, is support. ... One of the challenges with the Linux distribution model and support in regards to that is really what accountability does that commercial Linux distributor have to that software."
An of course, Windows (complete with all it's get out clauses in the EULA) is completely supported at all levels and Microsoft can be held completely accountable?
"If we have a particular problem in a certain piece of software ... when we go through that chain of support with our commercial Linux distributor ... In many cases the response is we need to stick with the version that's available at the time that we purchased that distribution. ... so for example if I'm running Apache 1.3 ... although I may want Apache 2.0 because it might have new features or it might have some new capabilities, I'm outside of my support model."
Kettle meet Pot. I suppose Microsoft will support all versions of Microsoft and non-Microsoft software, then? Is this the "value" they're adding to Windows? If so, I want a piece of it!
"IDC did a study with Windows 2000 compared to Red Hat, and they found that Microsoft Windows, over a five-year period, offered anywhere from 11 to 22% greater TCO on four out of five of those major workloads."
I'm getting fuzzy now. Is that the IDC report funded by Microsoft which compares Windows 2000 in a dual-Xeon 900 vs RedHat on an IBM mainframe?
"The one that we didn't win was the Web work load, but that was with IIS 5.0 and I'm pretty confident with IIS 6.0 we've gotten some of the provisioning issues resolved and I think we can have a good TCO discussion with customers even with the Web work load."
But of course, Microsoft *will* support using a version of IIS that *didn't* come with the operating system?
"a previous organization that I ran with a server farm of about 400 Linux servers, after a period of time I ended up having to employ quite a few deep operating system-level engineers to support that environment. ... Was that my business, to be an operating system developer? No, it wasn't. It was to sell commercial goods online, just like some customers make golf clubs and sell those. They're not in the business to write operating systems."
Seems like someone isn't entirely sure about the differences between "writing an operating system" and "maintaining an operating system". What kind of systems was this guy running if he had to employ "quite a few" engineers to develop kernel stuff internally? Or is he trying to say that his normal stock of MS monkeys weren't sure how to load kernel modules, so he had to find someone who did?
"I was looking at something called the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer. It's a new tool kit from the Exchange team that allows a mail administrator, an Exchange administrator, to run this tool against his Exchange and Active Directory environment, get a deep understanding of the configuration, and then make recommendations based on that. Harvesting that type of best practices ... As I was looking at the tool, I was asking some of my guys how would we do this with Sendmail or qmail and there was a lot of laughs and giggles because ... it's probably using a search engine ... to see what other best practices might be out there."
*Exactly* who's best practice? Does Microsoft's idea of best practice necessarily reflect mine?
"Let me give you one of my first experiences with one of the first pieces of software I contributed to the open-source community years ago. It was a small patch to an Apache module and I quickly got some feedback from some guys on the BOS team who were working on BOS said that I broke their Apache on BOS. And I saw sort of the value of the community development, but the real question I had was "what other things did I break?" because no one decided to e-mail me back about if I broke some other module or some other system."
I was under the impression that it wasn't necessary for all other developers to keep an individual developer informed of changes and bugs. If the patch had been accepted into Apache, then surely any bug reporting would go to Apache rather than the the individual developer. It's the responsibility of the developer to keep tabs on his patch, if he so wishes.
"I think one other thing that people also want to extract value from when they're buying Microsoft is also a level of innovation... being something so "front foot out there," leading edge like, you know, speech recognition or things like that"
Leading edge? Speech recognition? Innovative? Why was I under the impression that there has been some level of speech recognition software available (IBM ViaVoice, for example) around for donkey's years? I would hardly call that innovative. Surely Microsoft's speech recognition engine is yet another casualty of their "embrace and extend" approach?
"I think about it really in terms of you really hire software to do a job."
If that isn't a "roadmap", I don't know what is! I wonder when Microsoft are actually going to introduce monthly fees for the "hire" of their OS, and probably a clause in the EULA that introduces a hefty penalty fine should you choose to not pay on time, or defect to another system. If you've made it this far, you really have too much time on your hands! Congratulations. That's almost at the bottom, but there weren't any further comments that stood out, so I'll leave it there. Grant. -- Artificial intelligence is no match for nuratal stidutipy. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.