Linux-Advocacy Digest #869, Volume #27 Sat, 22 Jul 00 05:13:03 EDT
Contents:
Re: What I've always said: Netcraft numbers of full of it (R.E.Ballard ( Rex Ballard
))
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From: R.E.Ballard ( Rex Ballard ) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: What I've always said: Netcraft numbers of full of it
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 08:18:24 GMT
In article <Sz4d5.27544$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Drestin Black" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> "mlw" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > Otto wrote:
> > >
> > > "mlw" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > > : This is all well and good, however, you are missing some very
> important
> > > : facts when dealing with Microsoft.
> > > :
> > > : The "support" you get as a fortune 500 company is hell and away
far
> > > : better than anything one could hope for in a mere regular sized
> company,
> > > : and using Windows NT as a solution, you WILL need that tech
support.
> > >
> > > Versus Linux, which doesn't need tech support? Get real....
> >
> > Linux does need tech support, all complex systems will, however, the
> > APIs are all public, the knowledge is freely available. With
Microsoft
> > one has to pay for everything and sign a whole bunch of
non-disclosure
> > forms.
Bottom line, you have a highly competitive free-market economy
competing for your dollars. Getting Linux kernel/library/driver
support is more like finding VB programmers. There are dozens of
companies that provide support ranging from biggies like IBM to
midsize like VA Linux and Red Hat, down to little guys with big
customers (developer of PERL).
> Untrue and if you'd actually worked with MS you'd know this.
I don't work for Microsoft an I know that this is partially false
and partially true. The statement as written (all APIs are protected
by NDA agreements) is totally false. Anyone willing to spring for
the Visual C++ with Visual studio - especially the professional
edition can get a great deal of information about the publicly
disclosed APIs, these are the programming language calls available
to application programmers (Application Programmer Interfaces).
Microsoft publishes nearly all of these and even offers some sample
source code. They provide this for C++, Visual Basic, J++, and
VBScript.
This is using the strictest definition of "Application Programmer"
interfaces.
Will this enable you to access the USB bus protocol to see why you
scanner won't work? No. Microsoft considers that a system programmer
interface and doesn't disclose that information. Linux and UNIX
consider that an Application Programmer Interface and include the
structure definitions in the public /usr/include/sys directories.
Will this enable you to access the DVD-CSS protocol so that you can
find out who pirated your movie? Nope, that's a system protocol
protected by an NDA which Microsoft demanded in exchange for it's
integration into Windows 98, and cannot be disclosed unless you pay
the right people about $6000, sign an agreement not to publish any
information, source code, and/or reverse engineerable code. A guy
in Norway figured it out intuitively, published the source code,
and then the MPAA published the code again in it's legal briefing
(making the code publicly available without an NDA). It appears on
the surface that the MPAA was the force driving the NDA, but with
the public filing which included the unabridged source code as part
of a filing available on the internet, it's pretty obvious that
Microsoft was driving that boat. Some of the partners are probably
licensing the DeCSS code as we speak.
> Sure, you pay for their products.
Yes. Microsoft thinks that their products are worth 4-10 times
the price of their nearest competitor. They have managed to get
about 1400 corporate executives who make key purchasing decisions
for about 700 companies who employ over 10,000 employees each
to agree - but they don't actually pay that price either. Microsoft
gives them huge discounts direct purchase agreements, and direct
access from the corporate help-desk to Microsoft's direct support
line.
Put another way, by use of bribes, threats, blackmail, extortion,
other illegal means, Microsoft only needs to hammer about 1400 people
to get over 21 million machines every 2 years. Such a deal!
By making Windows/Office/Visual Studio... as incompatible with UNIX
and Linux as possible, companies who want to do business with the
owners of those 21 million machines have to buy 65 million Windows
machines just to read the documents created by Microsoft office.
Not a bad racket. Send a rep who'll do anything to close a 100,000
user license for Windows NT, get some information that can be leveraged
a for a few years, and you get $60 million in licenses ($600/user/year)
every year (by alternating Windows releases and Office releases).
Add another 10,000 developer licenses, another 200,000 seat licenses,
and another 100,000 concurrent user licenses, and lets not forget
the user support contracts. Add to that training, trips to seattle,
and NDAs for access to future products which prevent public disclosure
of pretty much anything to the press that Microsoft might not like,
and you have a really "interesting" concentration of power.
It reminds me of the "Master of the House" inkeeper's song in
Le Miserables
> MS is one of those _rare_ companies that actually
> charges for their product and
and charges, and charges, and charges, and charges. :-)
> sometimes even returns a profit for it's shareholders.
In which year did Microsoft NOT make a profit? I thought they had
been returning about 40 cents/share since they first went public.
Of course, they never give any of it back in dividends, but then
again, vaporware costs a lot of money.
Of course, this puts a lot of pressure on Microsoft to continue
to grow at 20%/year (doubling every 4 years). This means that
by 2004, Microsoft will have to find some way of getting $80 billion
per year from roughly 80 million employees. This means that the
average person will need to pay Microsoft $1,000/year.
After all, we wouldn't want to disappoint the holders of those
5 billion shares to be dissappointed, especially since Bill, Steve,
and Paul own about 2.5 billion and another billion are held by
the venture capital funds, nonvoting shares from stock-swaps, and
shares held by dead people (mutual funds used for pepetual care
annuities).
> non-disclosure is only if you need to get in deeper/closer
> than a typical end-user/developer/integrator needs to.
This really depends on who's talking. Nearly all of the third
party developers have fits every time Microsoft comes out with
a new version of MS-Office because Microsoft ends up using APIs
that were never disclosed to developers, even under NDAs.
If you're an application programmer and you make a function call
that sends NT into the trees (BSOD or worse) it's really frustrating
not to be able to find out what happened other than that you called
a GDI routine and never came back.
And of course the all-time favorite is when you spend a year
developing in Borland C++ and a month after your product (which
competes with Microsoft's) comes out, Microsoft issues a patch
which causes your application to self-destruct after about 2 hours.
It worked flawlessly through betas, pilot, and roll-out, and blew
up after a patch impacted 3 million users - fun.
Microsoft seems to have a nasty habit of forcing application
developers to use huge modules (OLE, COM, ActiveX) that are
essentially, Microsoft Office applications that can't be ported
to any other platform. Furthermore, if you do provide support
for portable protocols, you find yourself competing against a
Microsoft supported proprietary protocol that's incompatible with
yours.
> I've never seen a NDA
> used on a end-user site (except in beta or benchmarking).
> The MS support system is far better than the insults
> and spotty linux user support that
> depends on if the moon is full and who you know and how you phrased a
> question less you be labled a troll or told to RTFM in four
> langagues...
Yes. Certainly the WORST way to get support is to post you question
to Comp.os.linux.advocacy, along with a short diatribe of how terrible
Linux is and how much you hate it.
The fact is, most of us have been there. There are some nice
newsgroups (comp.os.linux.setup) where if you simply aske your
question (I don't know how to set up my RAGE ATI card, I read
the manual, I found the Xconfig stuff in the how-to, but I'm lost.
Please help?
Usually, you will get a response within a few hours (often within
a few minutes). Those guys will tell you which manual covers the
topic, which settings to set, which driver supports the rage,
and if there any patches for your particular card.
And of course, since Linux providers make their support by selling
Linux, there is a tendency to get much better support from people
who have offered to support you for a price. If you don't want
to spend $45 for a commercial version of Linux that includes
telephone, email, and chat-room support, along with searchable
archives - and you instead want to insult the people you are
asking for help, you might not get as much support as you'd like.
The commercial supporters and consultants do know each other pretty
well, and they do tend to answer each others questions more quickly
than the 47th edition of "how come my winmodem didn't autoconfig?".
> > > : Fortune 500 companies make "strategic partnerships"
> > > : for technology, i.e.
> > > : they do not pay full price Microsoft
> > > : for technology and support, and
> > > : Microsoft gets to claim the fortune
> > > : 500 company as a "customer."
> > > : There
> > > : is usually a stock exchange involved as well.
> > >
> > > Care to substanciate this claim with actual data?
I do know that I have worked for several "strategic partners"
(it was almost as if Microsoft was following me around). They
asked the company to sign nondisclosure agreements, they asked
the employees to sign nondisclosure agreements that superceded
even the agreements with the employer (I refused to sign mine
since I was working on UNIX/Internet based projects). Since
I was the alliance developer coordinator for the product, I did
get to look at the corporate master agreement as well.
I've seen several such agreements. Most often, they are literally
left on the copier where I can "accidentally" find them. Of course,
I can't legally make a copy, I can't get an electronic copy, and
I can't disclose the actual contents under my employer NDA. I have
to wait at least 1 year after leaving most employers to even share
my recollections over the Internet.
Because I've been a "direct hire consultant" (on company payroll
but under a project oriented agreement) with several rather large
companies, I did get a much better view than most. I was also
a manager/architect at each of these positions because I was working
directly with managers of several divisions (as a peer).
The agreements with Dow Jones, Quick & Reilly, McGraw-Hill, CSC,
and two CSC clients were pretty much as described above. The
agreement at Prudential didn't have the stock clause. In several
cases, the agreement was the direct result of not reading,
understanding, or honoring a more generalized license agreement
(but this wasn't reported to the CEO). For example, at McGraw-Hill,
a senior VP was told that the NT server license came with client
licenses that permitted the company to download copies of Windows NT
workstation onto workstations for $60/copy. It made sense (they
were paying about $60/copy for WfW). When Microsoft explained that
not only had they violated the copyright, but they now had to
cough up nearly $1 million in unbudgeted capital or forfeit licenses
to all products, the VP convinced the CEO that a "strategic alliance",
with all the strings, would be in the company's best interest.
I allude to this in www.open4success.com/bio
In another case, the Quick brothers were convinced that they should
hire someone reccomended by a Microsoft rep when a license audit
revealed that the admins had forgotten to pay for several thousand
dollars worth of Microsoft software. Again, Microsoft gave them
the option of hiring their man (even though the position was filled),
and becoming Microsoft strategic partners. The new man wanted to
use Windows 95 (which had just come out) as their trading system
web server. He was committed to getting the SCO machines out of
the company and providing an "all Microsoft" solution. It nearly
destroyed the company.
In a number of conversations with Merril Lynch, we discussed
approaches to getting web enabled. Each discussion seemed to
go from - "we want to do something really big and really important
and it's critical that everything works perfectly and we only have
so much time to do it" followed by my saying "Good, let's prototype
on Linux or UNIX, move to Solaris as early as possible, and deploy
to production on big Sun boxes". They repeatedly came back with
"we'd like to but we have to do everything on Microsoft because of
our strategic alliance agreement, we have a very tight relationship
with them and can get anything we need". We then discussed some
of the problems. Had they solved reliability problems (no), had they
solved performance problems (no), had they solved remote support
problems (no), had they solved clustering problems (no), had they
solved security problems (no), had they resolved reliability problems
(no), and so on. It was clear that Microsoft wanted to pick my brain
for solutions, but during three of these conversations we were
discussing NT 4.0 with service pack 1. To be generous, this wasn't
a product that was ready for prime time (SP-3 was O.K. for a
workstation).
I can't discuss current clients, but it's sufficent to say that
most of my current clients are looking to get AWAY from NT, not
move into NT. They are hoping that switching to Windows 2000 will
buy them enough time to make the switch. Linux is part of the strategy
(a cheap way to teach people UNIX concepts, get prototypes without
waiting for big-iron servers, and create testbeds that can be migrated
to big-iron UNIX systems later in the development cycle.
I'm quite aware that there is also direct support coming from IBM,
Sun, HP, Compaq, SCO, and a number of other commercial UNIX providers
who would really like to see the Linux 2.4 kernel be as stable as
their "big iron UNIX" system. Linus has been getting more help than
usual, from some pretty big names.
> > I can, just do a web search on a good engine you'll find lots of
> > "Strategic Marketing" agreements between MS and whom ever.
>
> Why don't you do just what and give us the results.
> Perhaps you'll do better than I did.
> Of COURSE F500 companies do not pay full price.
> Hell, who pays full price?
> CDW.COM hello? same product, cheaper.
> And are you telling me that you are not aware that
> the bigger you are the better prices you'll get?
Yes, if you are a really big company, you can get 120,000 licenses
for 100,000 users for 20% of MSRP. Of course if you only want
80,000 licenses, you'll have to pay 40% of MSRP. For a $100 product
(MSRP) you'd pay $24 million for 120,000 licenses. If you buy 80,000
licences you'll have to pay $32 million, and THEN you'll have to
come back and by more at the 40% rate. And if you wait until next
year, you'll have to 60% of MSRP.
Of course, the big problem was that Microsoft really wanted to be paid
in stock rather than in cash. That was a problem for this company
since it was a Mutual. I think Microsoft settled for options.
I was sitting with the Microsoft directly behind me, talking quite
loudly, and after I'd left a Linux CD-ROM at her desk :-). I had
a few discussions with her, but she had no clue as to my Linux/UNIX
bias. As it was, I was able to convince the company to pass on the
Office 97 and hold out for Office 2000 (which came out early the
following year). I had read the Office 97 EULA agreement that
indicated that the company would have to purchase additional licenses
for all machines used by employees. Eventually, Gartner Group
noticed this little change in the agreement too, and this was enough
to convince everyone to "hold off". We told all contractors and
consultants that we would only accept documents stored in Office 95
formats.
Of course Microsoft had a revenue plan, so they ran an electronic
license audit of all servers and clients and hit us for about $60
million in Client Access Licenses - which was a bit of a problem
we were over budget on most of our NT projects and had reallocated
the capital to more servers. Appearantly, Microsoft decided that
since we were using Lotus Notes servers (several hundred of them)
that the concurrent user counts should be increased based on
peak-1/2hour rates.
> Why does this suprise you.
> What makes you think that MS would NEED to
> exchange stock with a F500 company to get
> it to "lie" that it's a MS customer,
Again, this is an overstatement and Drestin is right. The agreements
don't tell the customer to lie about being a customer. They prevent
the customer from publishing any documents for general public
consumption that might "hurt the brand". Essentially, they can't
report down-times, benchmarks, development cycles, or other
information which may effect the value of the brand without first
getting Microsoft's approval.
Until late in 1998, this included making statements to law enforcment
agencies, federal investigators, and lawyers of the plainiff in
any lawsuit. This was only moderated when the DOJ motioned for
Obstruction of Justice when Microsoft's lawyers insisted on
sitting in on interviews with key people at known "problem companies".
When company officers did testify against Microsoft, Microsoft did
ask the CEOs to "repair damage done to the brand" by making public
statements designed to indicate that they really liked Microsoft.
Keep in mind, I am posting information that is at least 1 year out
of date, and I am posting as an individual not as the representative
of any corporation (Open4Success is not currently a corporation).
The contracts may have changed since then.
Again, Microsoft attempts to make it seem like they are making a
very simple and reasonable request that shouldn't be considered
too carefully. It's only when you step in the bear trap that
you discover how painful it's jaws can be.
> when all the Fortune 500 companies
> are already using MS products
> (somewhere, some more some less).
Not only are ALL of the Fortune 500 companies using Microsoft
products (even Sun), but most of them are heavily dependent on
Micrsoft products. They are so dependent in fact, that if Microsoft
"pulled the plug" (revoked their licenses) every company would
collapse in a matter of weeks. It would make the Great Depression
look like a mild correction.
The DOJ case did one thing. It exposed Microsoft's tactics to
all of the corporate officers. It created a body of evidence
to show the extremes to which Microsoft was willing to go to
protect and extend it's monopoly.
Many corporations are seeing this as a wake-up call. They are
looking at measures to reduce their total dependency on one
company totally controlled by 2 men (Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer)
for their continued existence. When Bill Gates tried to pull
the plug on IBM, IBM got very interested in Linux and UNIX. When
Bill Gates tried to pull the plug on Netscape, Jim Barksdale got
very interested in Linux. When Bill Gates tried to pull the plug
on local newspapers, Gannet (one of the largest publishers of local
newspapers plus USA Today), Gannet got very interested in Linux.
When Microsoft pulled the plug on Corel, Corel got very interested
in Linux.
Microsoft and Bill Gates have burned many, many, many, many, many
bridges. There are probably 500 companies, many of them once
huge billion dollar enterprises, that were decimated in value
because Microsoft pulled the plug. This isn't even limited
to the computer industry. Gates has made his presence felt
in everything from Car Dealerships, to Travel Agents, to Mortgage
Brokers, to Satellite and Cable TV (Gates owned a big piece of
PrimeStar which then merged with Direct TV), to Television (MSNBC,
CNBC), to the President of the United States (see note 1: at bottom)
Many companies have gone past Linux streight to UNIX (FreeBSD, BSDi,
AIX, Solaris, HP_UX, True64, SCO...).
> When one company lets MS use them in
> greater detail for advertising,
> I'm sure there is SOME compensation, but,
> sure, why not. Doesn't change the facts of what was done and how.
Again, Microsoft asks for the right to take any comments made by
the company or it's executives and edit it - in or out of context -
to suit Microsoft's purposes. Since Micrsoft has final approval
over all public statements related to Microsoft, even a scathing
criticism can be turned into an unabashed blessing. Furthermore,
most companies don't bother to ask for reciprocity (requiring
Microsoft to clear all statements involving the client through
ITS legal and PR department). Many companies (mostly software
and OEM companies) have gone out of existance (or from top 10
to not even in the top 100) because of statements made by Microsoft
which destroyed their brand. (note DOJ Findings of Fact and
Findings of Law).
> > > : There is a HUGE and important gray area
> > > : between someplace like dell.com
> > > : where MS and Dell have strategic business dealings,
> > > : and someplace like
> > > : valinux which does not.
> > > : It is also arguable that between "joes web site"
> > > : and the fortune 500, exists a vast area of
> > > : the economy which employs 99
> > > : percent of the working people in the USA.
For clerification,
<A href=http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/smallbus.html>
668 companies with over 10,000 employees (the Fortune 500)
provide about 1/3 of all the jobs.
Another third are provided by companies of less than 100 people.
Another 1/5 are provided by companies from 100 to 1000 employees.
About 1/6 are provided by companies from 1000 to 9999 employees.
> > > : To simply say that the fortune 500 use NT,
> > > : so it's good, is false.
> > > : The fortune 500 companies can pay for the huge
> > > : expenses that an NT environment will incur
> > > : in exchange for the "strategic" business
> > > : opportunities which the monopoly Microsoft provides.
Ever been down-sized?, right-sized? capsized? :-)
When a company gets a $60 million dollar royalty bill from
Microsoft, that's 600 to 1200 jobs for a year. If the upgrade
requires hardware upgrades, that's another $600 million or 6000
jobs. Worse, it isn't like these people just cease to exist. They
have intimate knowledge of your company, and they will be taking
that knowledge to your competitiors or creating new companies of
their own, to compete with you. They'll be using last releases's
computers (which you literally gave away or paid to have hauled
away), AND they will come back to you as consultants at double
their previous salary. I almost felt guilty consulting for
a former employer at nearly 3 times the price they paid me as
a salaried employee. But not guilty enough not to bill them.
> > > : For the merely normal sized companies that
> > > : do not have the clout to grab Microsoft's
> > > : attention and good graces, NT is a disaster
> > > : of unreliability and poor cost/performance.
There really isn't much difference. The big differences between
a small company of 1000 workstations and a big company of 100,000
workstations is that the smaller company has only 25 servers to
deal with and the big company needs nearly 3500 (more than exponential
growth because communications overhead, latency, and redundancy reduce
aggregate performance).
Even more interesting is that the resources needed to support the
equivalent horsepower in a UNIX farm is about 1/4 the number of
boxes, and 1/10th the number of operatiors. Imagine, you can move
90% of you "box booters" onto development teams (the ones willing
to learn Linux then UNIX).
> > > You are contradicting yourself.
> > > In one hand you claim that "Fortune 500
> > > companies make "strategic partnerships"
> > > for technology, i.e. they do not pay
> > > full price Microsoft for technology and support",
> > > in another you claim that
> > > "The fortune 500 companies can pay for the huge expenses".
> > > Make up your mind....
Both statements are correct. As Winvocates often point out, the cost
of the software is only a small portion of the total IT overhead.
The cost of maintaining staff to support boxes that require
controlled shutdowns weekly and go into unscheduled outages about
once every week or two (99.8% uptime=20 minutes down/week).
Again, my observations are a bit out of date :-), but the reports
I saw showed average uptime on 3500 NT servers to be roughly 98.9%
almost 2 hours downtime/week. Much of this was because the
applications were mostly nontrivial. If all you are doing is file
shares, the availability improves (about 99.5% when the group was
isolated). For 3500 servers that are down about 7000 hours/week,
you need roughtly 200 FTEs, plus management (several layers in fact).
for about 250 FTEs. At $100,000/year (typical among the Fortune 500
including overhead, benifits, and vacations), you have roughly $25
million a year in "box booters". Actually, these are the "fire
fighters" and need to be able to identify the problem, institute
recovery, and get things running in less than 2 hours/problem.
Add to this the cost of routine scheduled maintainance (roughly 1
hour/week/server due to manual interfaces), and you get a bill of
around $40 million/year. Another 400-1000 workers taken out of
production.
This does not include the cost of the help desk support for the
100,000 NT workstations. Fortunately, most people don't really
expect help and usually give up after the 2nd or third call.
Most of the problems go back to needing to reboot, reinstall,
and reengineer. If you figure 5 hours lost per week (average
including reboots, reinstalls, and reengineering), or roughly
250 hours/year, times 10
> Let me say this very clearly: Bullshit.
> W2K is NOT buggy nor unstable -
All things are relative. Compared to an NT, Windows 2000
is solid as a rock. I've been getting statistics of less
than 15 minutes of unscheduled down-time per MONTH (99.97%).
As reported by Microsoft, this is about 5 times more reliable
than NT and about 30 times more reliable than Windows 95.
Of course, you still have the 1 hour/week of scheduled outages.
But this still cuts administration costs by nearly 30%.
Unfortunately, the demand for server power keeps going up. Your
savings gets eaten by demand for more servers.
The problem is than when you start getting into solutions
involving more than 20 W2K servers, costs increase
exponentially. By the time you get to clusters of over 200
servers running a single application, logistics becomes a
nightmere. SMS helps, but you still have lot's of people
on roller-blades tryng to cover their zones (I have heard
one company attempting this). Realistically, you need
about 1 administrator for every 5 applications servers (databases,
IIS with ASP, BackOffice, Notes, other shrink wrapped solutions),
and 1 administrator for every 10 "trivial servers" (single
service such as file shares, print, DNS/WINS, or trivial IIS
(static pages only). For custom applications, the number seems
to be 1 admin for every 3 production boxes.
Linux has more effective scripting, better support of remote access by
multiple administrators, and memory protection and fast context
switching along with effective cache management that makes it much
easier to run more applications on fewer machines with fewer
administrators. In large corporate environments, you can also have
Linux machine working as "specialists". Many large corporations
will use Linux for SMTP/POP mail servers, departmental web sites,
discussion groups, routers, firewalls, and staging. Linux is also
a bit more reliable than Windows 2000, with about 5 minutes/month
average downtime and scheduled manual maintainence (reboots) required
about once every 3-6 months. This cuts your IT management staffing
requirements to about 1 administrator for every 20 application servers.
Big-Iron-UNIX from commercial providers has down-times measured in
minutes per YEAR or parts per million. Many guarantee "5 nines"
which means 99.999% up time or BETTER. This is 10 parts per million,
or roughly 5 minutes per year in unscheduled down-time. In many cases,
the cluster is never brought completely down, servers are isolated,
upgraded, and restored to service.
> quite the opposite. And all your bluster and
> whinning cannot change this
> fact. The OS has proven itself already
> (and did even in beta) to millions.
Microsoft's own figure indicate 3 million systems. Not overwhelming.
Note 1: (MSNBC leaked the
existance of the Lewinski tapes, the affair, and the interrogation
on MSNBC web site, then gave it prime-time 12/hour/day coverage
when the media had previously decided not to cover it. I'm not
defending Clinton's behavior but, Microsoft used it's control
of the Media to divert attention from it's own courtroom antics.
--
Rex Ballard - Open Source Advocate, Internet
I/T Architect, MIS Director
http://www.open4success.com
Linux - 40 million satisfied users worldwide
and growing at over 5%/month! (recalibrated 7/2/00)
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
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