Posted on 05/15/2003 12:02:59 PM PDT by mikenola
By Reuters May 15, 2003, 7:32 AM PT
Microsoft has had a strategy to discount its products heavily when the software giant competes for orders against the emerging license-free Linux operating system, according to a report. The International Herald Tribune newspaper said Thursday that according to internal Microsoft e-mail it obtained, Microsoft's chief sales executive, Orlando Ayala, last summer authorized executives to offer steep discounts.
"Under no circumstances lose against Linux," Ayala was quoted saying by the newspaper, adding that the discounts could be paid for by a special fund.
The newspaper also cites a Microsoft marketing manager as saying that the funds would be used again in the next fiscal year, beginning in July.
Microsoft representatives were not immediately available for comment.
Microsoft's Windows is the dominant operating system software on desktop computers around the world, and the company is pushing into the market for more powerful and expensive computers. A range of Microsoft rivals are promoting Linux as a cheap alternative to Windows.
The discounts that cash-rich Microsoft is said to be offering may put further pressure on software monolith, which is under investigation by European market regulators for abusing its market dominance. Governments and organizations in many countries are interested to use Linux on desktop computers, which is already a successful rival to Unix and Windows in server computers, used to power Web sites and corporate software.
"Governments in the Asia-Pacific region and several in Europe and South America are encouraging government departments and enterprises to consider alternatives to Microsoft," said the editor in chief at market research group Gartner.
Europe and Linux The German Interior Ministry has started replacing desktop computers and servers with IBM machines running Linux.
Linux software runs 15 percent of all servers sold in Western Europe in 2002, compared with 56 percent of servers running on Windows, according to research group IDC.
But just as Microsoft changed the computer industry 25 years ago when it started selling operating software as a separate product, Linux is changing the game again, analysts said.
"Linux software is owned by the software community. For Microsoft that's a very hard fight. If it says it doesn't want to lose against Linux, that's a statement against the community," said IDC analyst Martin Hingley.
Linux is being distributed by hundreds of companies, which are not allowed to charge for the core software, but which do charge for modifications, services and maintenance.
A research report paid for by Microsoft earlier this year concluded that over a longer period there was no cost advantage over Windows when running computers on Linux. Maintenance and support for Linux would sometimes be higher than Windows.
"Linux is everyone's favorite operating system, but it's relatively immature, plus software development by community takes a lot of time," Hingley said.
Gartner analyst Robin Simpson added, "Enterprises must be careful not to view Linux as a panacea. Although in some situations Linux may be appropriate, on the desktop it isn't always less expensive or easier to manage then Microsoft operating systems and applications."
LOL
Linux is a version of unix, it is very stable and is 30 years old...
Gee, wonder who paid for that report.
They left out Balmer's Window's marketing hype - "It just works" [After 20 years, we could hope…]
I used some linux here at home a long time ago, and I have (legal, bought and paid for) MS Products everywhere else.
I am kind of torn; I feel beholden to MS because they made products that look and feel consistant.. and apps like VB that allow even a schmuck like me to write computer software to solve unique problems.
But the Linux concept itself is kind of romantic. It works well and does what it's supposed to do when it's supposed to do it with no quirks or backtalk.
Now, Now, If not for Gate's father(one of those lower then scum type lawyers), he would be in the same boat as a lot of other IT folks. And lest we forget, gates just happened to get IBM's product because IBM thought it would never sell. That doesn't take brains it takes being in the right place at the right time, or in other words luck.
Personally I think the inventors of Duct Tape and Paper Clips had the real get up and go American attitude, and brains to boot.
No one but geeks and server guys care about the lineage of UNIX and Linux. The immature part is the GUI and the GUI apps. I say this as someone who wrote "c" code for ten years.
Gee Ballmer,...how are you gonna compete on price with "free"?! Looks like a big Netscape sandwich...hope they enojy every revolting byte of it.
Yes it is, but to compete for market share, Linux will need something like Small business Server. MySQL is not ready to take on SQL Server. Oracle could, but that affects the pricing.
The smartest thing Microsoft ever did was spend money on Word and Excel (and Powerpoint). Most people I know who aren't geeks think these are what computers do.
What? Please, if you're going to regurgitate the FUD that is issued from the Redmond campus, please do try and wrap it up in something that is sensible.
Community based systems are MUCH faster than giant, monolithic corporations. If you doubt this, monitor the Linux kernel mailing list. Patches are submitted daily for fixes and improvements. Security patches are released within hours of a reported security bug.
When the SSL bug was found, I could get source code diffs within two hours, tarballs of SSL source code within a day, official FreeBSD patches in two days and RedHat packages within three days. Microsoft took from August 6th, the day the bulletin was published, to September 4th to issue a patch, nearly a month.
And even though Microsoft commited to supporting Windows NT until June of this year, they declined to fix the SSL bug at all for that release, "suggesting" that you should upgrade instead.
Additionally, Microsoft can't even keep their official patches from breaking their own previous official patches as we saw with the SQL Slammer fiasco.
My experience, and by the comments on most of the mailing lists and boards it is a common experience, Open Source development tends to go very, very fast, sometimes to the point where I will finish installing an application only to find that while I was installing it, a new version been published.
Your assertion that community development is slower than proprietary development attempts to stand the truth on it's head.
And I wonder if all of those Linux kernel hackers at Sun, IBM and HP agree with your notion that they are all in some nameless company.
You did hear that IBM is investing a billion dollars in Linux, right?
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