> Well, well, well. Anyone remember those battling Linux vs. Windoze NT
> links I posted last week? Well, the fine folks at The Reg decided to do
> a little investigating. Here's the scoop:
>
> www.theregister.co.uk/991018-000017.html
>
> It's getting ugly out there, for sure.
I'm inclined to think that the debate is starting to get meaningless.
Eric Raymond was right about Microsoft when he pointed to their use of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt - against their competitors. FUD works for Microsoft in a way that it doesn't work for their competitors because Microsoft is the standard, in a lot of areas. The old adage about never being fired for buying IBM applies.
In my experience, IT managers by and large just look for an excuse to keep on doing the same thing. Sub-optimality isn't the issue. Control of 'business process' is.
All Microsoft needs to do is convince IT managers that Linux isn't the magic bullet it was made out (by some) to be, that it won't solve their business process problems.
Personally, I think the ESR/Open Source approach of selling Linux and 'Open Source' software as a kind of magic bullet - with all the posturing involved - opened up a target for Microsoft to attack. The romanticised picture of the relation between people and people - the 'Bazaar' that could be built outside of, and against, the boring corporate 'Cathedral' that most programmers spend their lives in - led Linux groupies into terrain where their concerns could easily be written off as cranky, unrealistic and simply 'not good business sense'.
That's why I think the current debate about Microsoft's twisting of comparison results is going to turn out to be largely irrelevant.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.