Microsoft won't cut Windows price to beat Linux

Reuters via Forbes.com ^ | 10/9/02 | Caroline Humer

[Bush2000]

You CANNOT assume that the administrators need retraining. There is a significant installed base, with existing admins.

Dinky webservers and ISPs, yeah. But not in Fortune 500 companies, dude. That's where the real money will be spent.

[Bush2000]

Linux, along with Solaris, also came out ahead of Windows in terms of administration costs, despite the fact that it's less expensive to hire Windows system administrators.

That data is bogus. The study assumed limitations on the number of servers administered by Windows versus Linux versus Solaris admins.

[dennisw]

Ballmer is a liar. Just like Gates. Ballmer spreads lies. Lindows being a good example. He is not TV friendly but then you know this. He is a lousy liar.

M$ is chock full of weenies who look at the M$ stock price 30 times each day. Wondering n hoping when will they be worth 1 mil or 10 mil or 100 mil. But the good old days are gone. Your stupid software is a mature product. That's why you started product activation. You are mining for profits now, not creating what is needed because not much new is really needed.

[TechJunkYard]

The only thing I find "innovative" in XP is its ability to make your hardware appear obsolete as soon as you buy it, through its sluggish and unstable performance. In short, it sucks.

BUT... it's apparently still tolerable. If it wasn't, you'd have some incentive to LOOK at your Linux system and LEARN why it's not working right. Logon to a virtual console, run top, or procinfo, and see what's bogging it down. Rerun Xconfigurator and try some different video modes. Go out and look at some comp.os.linux newsgroups and see if you can get some help.

If you're not willing to invest the time and effort to get it running right, and merely want to sit back and complain, then just reload Windows and be happy with it.

[Bush2000]

Your stupid software is a mature product. That's why you started product activation. You are mining for profits now, not creating what is needed because not much new is really needed.

This is about the only truth in your statements, dennis. I agree with you on this point. There's no such thing as adding a few features and bumping the version number anymore. Customers have to be convinced of real value before they will upgrade.

[rdb3]

I'm running RH7.3 at home on my primary machine.

Have you seen Red Hat 8.0 yet? I'm a serious Slack user, but I have to admit that RH8.0 is very sweet. I'm extremely pleased with it.

[chilepepper]

Excuse me. WE had to spend money. To protect 500 users...

[dennisw]

I thank you then for your post. 

Many companies and industries have hit the wall of "mature product". Autos and steel did as the technology to make them proliferated. It used to be incredibly hard to make an Intel type CPU. Now AMD and Via/Cyrix do it and others could at a moment's notice if the profits were there. 

Same for MS office and your operating systems. These days you can get 10-30 (very) competent programmers together to make an M$ compatible office suite or a Linux distribution or Lindows. These 10-30 programmers are your competition.

[TechJunkYard]

Have you seen Red Hat 8.0 yet?... I'm extremely pleased with it.

I'm not. The Anaconda installer is very rough around the edges, and likes to crash when it runs up against memory and disk constraints. The Orinoco/Wavelan/Hermes support appears to be broken. Disk Druid can't create swap partitions in text mode. And that's just what I've found building laptops so far....

[B Knotts]

Hmmm...I thought Merrill Lynch was Fortune 500...but what do I know?

[Bush2000]

Hmmm...I thought Merrill Lynch was Fortune 500...but what do I know?

As a percentage, Linux has a small (but growing) representation in the Fortune 500. But you can't pick one deployment and assume that it represents the whole.

[KneelBeforeZod]

well I hope you gave the person who opened the offended attatchment donut duty for a month or so.

[Eala]

But I when can't get it to run on a plain vanilla Toshiba laptop, noted for stability and compatibility, my enthusiasm wanes.

jimt,

Ohhhhhhh, on a laptop!! That is an entirely different game. Though I have less experience installing on laptops, it has generally not been good. Originally I installed RedHat 6.? on a Toshiba, and had quite a number of problems. Two days before a trip I wiped it and put Windows back on. More recently I tried RH 7.0 (RH point-oh release: bad mistake) or 7.1 on my newer (work) Dell. Very quickly it was back to Windows.

Lesson: Don't install on exotic (defined as unusual or brand-new) hardware unless you want to fiddle, hunt down drivers, etc., and generally experience a lot of frustration. On stuff that's a bit older it seems fine.

I can now run Linux on my laptop -- but it runs on a VMWare virtual machine. As vanilla "hardware" as one can find, and Linux installs easily. .

[Eala]

Thanks! I sure wasn't feeling too swift trying to install Mandrake for the 5th time, I can tell you !

LOL. My first install on Win95 was just such a fiasco. 8 times I tried, and it locked up Every Single Time. Very frustrating.

Next day at the office I get a call from the (once computer-hating, but that's another story) wife, "Honey, I'm halfway into the Win95 install, how do I..."? All she did was to install without the mouse attached... and it worked!

[RiVer19]

I recently installed Mandrake 9.0 on my 400MHz Celeron with
128MB of RAM at work. It runs fine. But, it was sluggish
starting up apps. I checked the memory usage and found only about 16MB free on it. So, even Linux running KDE
graphical desktop eats up some memory. Don't get me wrong.
I love the Mandrake 9 system. I even setup a dual boot system at home and use the Linux side for most things I do.
But, the point is modern Linux takes some system resources to run well. With some added RAM to the old 400MHz Celeron the apps started up much quicker. But, it runs way
faster on my more modern computer at home.

[Eala]

Have you seen Red Hat 8.0 yet? I'm a serious Slack user, but I have to admit that RH8.0 is very sweet. I'm extremely pleased with it.

No, I haven't. After my very bad experiences with RH6.0 and RH7.0 I will not touch a RedHat N.0 distribution.

I've got too many other irons in the fire (embedded projects at home, political campaigns, riding herd on legislation, church duties, reading FR, etc.) to get into system stuff at this time.

Besides, I tend to be just a user. It's been a couple of releases since I last reconfigured and rebuilt a kernel. I'm using the machine too much for essential work to turn it into something that might be unreliable.

But I am quite looking forward to RH 8.1. *\:-)

What do you find to be the advantages of Slackware?

[TechJunkYard]

I tried RH 7.0 (RH point-oh release: bad mistake)

Have to agree with you there... it took until RH 7.3 to get that one decent; now it's on all my boxes. Unfortunately that one has several serious holes in the packages -- OpenSSL, OpenSSH, Apache, zlib, glibc (related to zlib I think) -- and sooner or later the amount of patching and upgrading one has to do after an install is going to be a pain.

RH 8.0 is out now, and I've got some problems with that one too, but it's not that structurally different from the 7.x releases... in time, RedHat will make 8.x worth the upgrade too.

[rdb3]

What do you find to be the advantages of Slackware?

I look at "advantages" as esoteric things. I like Slack the best because it is the most UNIX-like Linux distro. Since I like System V UNIX, Slack is very comfortable for me because it closely resembles System V.

That's about it.

[chilepepper]

Our shop went from Solaris/SunOS to LINUX

ZERO

retraining...

[Bush2000]

Unix => Unix

I wouldn't expect there to be retraining costs. But you don't represent the norm.