Microsoft is expanding its anti-Linux "Get the Facts" campaign by targeting the issue of reliability, a company executive said at the on Tuesday, the day the Open Source Business Conference kicked off in San Francisco. Get the Facts is a marketing effort by Microsoft that compares Windows favourably with Linux and other open source software products. Microsoft launched the campaign in mid-2003 and has gradually expanded its scope to include issues including total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and, the latest addition, reliability.

"Reliability has been challenging for us. It is an area that has been very noisy," admitted Martin Taylor, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft. "Customers say that reliability is very important to them and that they are hearing that Linux and Unix are more reliable than Windows." In the absence of a clear definition of reliability or benchmarks, Microsoft commissioned a study that pitted Windows Server 2003 against Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 3.0 AS. As part of the study, 18 Linux and 18 Windows system administrators were hired to run the simulated IT environments of a mid-sized company over a four day period.