[Microsoft] Ballmer 'fesses up to Linux/Windows cost FUD

The Register USA ^ | July 16, 2002 | Thomas C Greene

[JameRetief]

Ballmer 'fesses up to Linux/Windows cost FUD

By Thomas C Greene in Washington

Posted: 07/16/2002 at 14:25 EST

Windows is a lot more expensive to run than Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has finally confessed. Despite Redmond's heroic efforts to defeat common knowledge with elaborately-rigged total cost of ownership 'studies', innuendo, FUD and outright distortions, the rhetorical power of common experience has become too powerful, even for a marketing behemoth like MS.

According to an article by VARBusiness, Ballmer now concedes that MS execs "haven't figured out how to be lower-priced than Linux. For us as a company, we're going through a whole new world of thinking."

Interestingly, an old page on the MS Web site claiming that the lower costs of Linux are "a myth" has been removed. In its place is a more reasonable item cheerfully touting the many wonderful features in Windows which Linux, it's said, lacks.

So it seems MS is going to stop defying common sense and take an approach we could sum up as, 'it costs more because it's worth more'. This too will probably not survive informed criticism or daily experience, but it's certainly easier for the company's flacks and salesmen to say with a straight face. ®

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Not to incite a riot or anyting, but sometimes you get what you pay for...

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Paucity of drivers is a real drag on Linux. Had x42 been determined to help the consumer rather than damaging a major corporation, the government should have incentivized the development of drivers for Linux. That is, made it so that a system or peripheral lacking Linux capability had to be much cheaper than a competing system or peripheral which did have it, in order to win government contracts.

That, with no lawsuit, would have produced light with energy which in fact went up the chimney as wasted heat. Linux would be more widely supported, MS would be hurting but only for the legitimate reason that it was up against legitimate competition, computer users would have nothing to complain of in the outcome.

[Izzy Dunne]

the government should have incentivized the development of drivers for Linux.

Yeah, THAT is a job for the government, alright.
NOT!

[narby]

Now there's comparing apples and oranges. Since to do what I do with Linux would require a few hundred thousand dollars of specialy software to be written. Or - I could get by on a third of my productivity, I suppose.

[per loin]

Sometimes you get what you pay for; sometimes you get, as Ballmer has now admitted, lies.

[parsifal]

BUTTT! I figger that within the next few years, we'll have a good cheap reliable operating system. What else can the normal person do on a PC, that we can't pretty well do now. Now we have sound, graphics, movies, songs, word processing, internet, scanning, word recognition-visual, word-recognition-aural.

Its not that there won't be advances, but it looks to me like computing has finally reached a capability plateau, where PCs are doing most of what we want them to do. parsy.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

What is the limitation of linux, if not the chicken-and-egg problem of paucity of drivers limiting the attractiveness of the system, leading to a paucity of drivers?

The government has lots of specs on lots of things it buys. It could and should crush any attempt by Microsoft to prevent linux from being installed on government-purchased Wintel machines. And it should induce peripheral manufacturers to support linux. I see nothing in that proposal which is likely to slow innovation, and plenty of cause to believe that it would enhance it.

I would assume that a linux driver would be similar to a Sys X unix driver, and would thus be a starting point for Apple to get peripherals to work on Macs.

[eno_]

What do I pay to get a Windows I could audit for backdoors and compile into a working binary?

If I am a foreign government this is very valuable.

[blackfarm]

I'm using Lindows instead of MS myself. MS gives me the creeps.

[Illbay]

The competition will only serve to improve Microsoft. It really is win-win, whether they want to admit it or not.

How ironic that those who were such incredible go-getters (Gates, Allen, Ballmer et al) have taken to simply resting on their "laurels" and letting the free money roll in!

[Illbay]

...the government should have incentivized the development of drivers for Linux.

I'm sorry, my copy of the Constitution is kind of old--about 215 years in fact. I can't seem to find in it where the government is empowered to "incentivize the development of drivers for Linux."

Could you please point this out to me? Thanks.

[Illbay]

That's a great point. I am a self-employed structural engineer. I use a great many software packages that are written for Windows, and Windows only, including Autocad and many analysis tools. I even asked the developer of my high-end analysis software if they'd consider doing it for Linux, and the response was "what for? There is not much of a difference in capability from the user's standpoint, and there is also no demand for it in Linux."

Now, I have a little ol' server that sits in my closet, running on an old AMD K6-2 500 MHz system. It runs Linux, it is my internet server including email, etc., and it holds my job files, etc. I NEVER have to worry about it, and with Samba it just sits there DOING WHAT IT DOES BEST.

All the applications I use run on the Windows platform, and that's what ALL my workstations--2 WinXP and 1 Win2k--run.

It's the best of both worlds.

There is absolutely NO incentive for me to mess with what I have. None.

[Illbay]

How is Lindows? What did you pay for it? I get the Lindows (STUPID, STUPID name, BTW) email newsletter every week or so--I think the guy behind it started MP3.Com--and it sounds interesting but I thought it was still in the early development stage.

[connectthedots]

Not to incite a riot or anyting, but sometimes you get what you pay for...

Sounds like Apple 20 years ago. This argument won't last very much longer.

[John W]

How about what the Clinton DOJ did do,find that anywhere in there?

[Illbay]

Well, I do see where executing the laws of the land is there.

[connectthedots]

I get the Lindows (STUPID, STUPID name, BTW) email newsletter every week or so

How much do you suppose it would have cost to get the publicity Lindows has received for free simply because of its name as compared with some other name that doesn't really describe the product? Choosing the name 'Lindows' was marketing genius!

[John W]

If you subscribe to the theory that that is what the Clinton DOJ was doing re MS,that makes them about 1 for the 90s.

[SauronOfMordor]

In major corporations, there are lots of PC users who don't use their PC for much beyond word-processing, spread-sheet, and email. For such people (or more precisely, the company that has to lay out money to put a PC there), software availability and drivers are not issues

Linux will be cost-effective for two major groups: clericals, and people who would be using unix workstations anyway