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Making customers miserable the Microsoft way | |
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| Time: 13:58 EST/18:58 GMT | News Source: News.com | Posted By: Todd Richardson | ||
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As if the torrents of Windows-related security flaws were not enough, Microsoft has found another way to leave customers with a foul taste in their mouth and an empty feeling in their pocket. The problem this time centers on Microsoft's Software Assurance program, a for-purchase piece of Windows Licensing 6.0 that the company says offers users "automatic access to new technology and provides productivity benefits, support, tools and training to help deploy and use software efficiently." In reality, it's a software maintenance and upgrade program that puts even greater pressure on customers to renew existing Windows software. And time is running out: One-third of eligible contracts with Microsoft's biggest customers will be up for renewal by July 2004. | ||
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| #1 By 8589 (66.169.175.50) at 4/7/2004 2:36:48 PM |
| So, we have another anti-Microsoft story on activewin.com ... so sad. |
| #2 By 16451 (63.227.226.13) at 4/7/2004 5:51:43 PM |
| wow. even more dribble than a paid MS advertisement. |
| #3 By 9589 (68.17.52.2) at 4/7/2004 5:59:29 PM |
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Gee, could it be that the author works for a company, ITM Associates, that sells products (PDF inFusion eReview among others) that are in direct competition with some of Microsoft's products like SharePoint Portal Server and who's products work with IBM's Lotus Notes and Document Manager?
Nothing to see here, folks, move along now . . . Now you've done it - you got some of it on you! |
| #4 By 135 (208.186.90.168) at 4/7/2004 11:23:05 PM |
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Good catch, jdhawk.
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| #5 By 5912 (82.74.70.225) at 4/8/2004 7:57:53 AM |
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You people are all ignoring the problem: a lot of companies have difficulties in seeing the benifits from 6.0 (if there are any) and are moving to Linux for a more transparant alternative. This is not 'MS-bashing': as the article states about one third of the MS's customers seem to be dropping out. That is a serious problem. For Microsoft that is. They are going to have a hard time getting those customers back if they move over to other alternatives. This post was edited by rnmboon on Thursday, April 08, 2004 at 07:58. |
| #6 By 19992 (164.214.4.32) at 4/8/2004 9:08:41 AM |
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#2
Absolutly correct. It does cost more money to migrate to a new platform than it does to upgrade. That's a given. A migration is also not the full measure of TCO. In the case of the quote you provided the reverse would also hold true. It's fairly safe to claim that a total switch from Linux to Windows would be three to four times more expensive and take three times as long to deploy as an upgrade from one version of Linux to newer Linux releases." I'm glad you brought up liars writing editorials, what happens when a (D)idiot writes a report? You are quoting the results of a survey (not study, a survey) of a couple dozen CIOs and senior executives performed by Didio and Sunbelt Software. Most of the snippets from the article I've seen (with a few exceptions) are either A) patently false or B) make absolutly no sense. Here's a nice quote which would fall in the latter category. "The biggest growing concern for Linux in the business world, however, comes from the failure of vendors to indemnify their products. DiDio is quick to point out that doesn't just mean indemnification over legal disputes, such as the highly-publicized lawsuit filed by the SCO Group against IBM. "Indemnification covers much more than protection from litigation, DiDio said. It also shields companies from events, whether it's a national disaster or outage. For large organizations, lack of a product warranty is a non-starter, she said. What limited indemnification commercial Linux vendors like Red Hat, Novell's, SuSE, Hewlett-Packard provide is contingent on customers 'not making any modifications to the Linux code they distributed to you,' she said." Yep, Linux suffers from not offering to indemnify it's customers from national disasters. It's a shame that Linux will not or is not able to provide users and I.T staff with a guarantee that the software will not fail if an airplane crashes into the datacenter, which causes the building to collapse. Thank God that Microsoft does, oh wait, they don't either (nor should they). Why is indemnification such an issue in terms of this report? Well, let's look at another published quote in regards to this survey: "'Keep in mind that TCO includes the risk of deploying Linux with little or no indemnification for customers,' DiDio said. Ahh, so the costs of Linux (according to this survey) are higher in part due to the fact that Linux does not offer indemnification from events such as 9/11 or a nuclear holocaust. |
| #7 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 4/8/2004 12:49:56 PM |
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#11 - "You people are all ignoring the problem: a lot of companies have difficulties in seeing the benifits from 6.0 (if there are any) and are moving to Linux for a more transparant alternative."
I'm not ignoring that at all. If the article had been written by a CIO of a company like General Motors, or Wells Fargo Bank or some other consumer of Microsoft products, I would have found it interesting to see what points they make. But the article was written by someone who is a reseller of Microsoft competitor software. As such one wonders exactly what the motivation is, as well as what sort of experience this person actually has in this realm. "This is not 'MS-bashing': as the article states about one third of the MS's customers seem to be dropping out. " This particular article is just MS-bashing. #16 - I'm not convinced that the PJ guy who wrote that article is the brightest. |
| #8 By 19992 (164.214.4.32) at 4/8/2004 2:25:18 PM |
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#17
"1000" She (Laura Didio)told NewsFactor that it was an independent effort that included two-dozen interviews with CIOs and other high-level corporate officials. "Again, all I see from the OSS fanboys is smear tactics. Character assassination. Nothing of substance. Outright lies" Umm, a smear tactic would represent a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. All I'm doing is calling into question your source. If you are going to present something as the truth, you had better be able and willing to back it up with facts. The fact is, you can't back your side up. The report obviously has several flaws in it. Rather try to engage this conversation on a rational level, you've turned to name calling. Very mature of you. #18 "This particular article is just MS-bashing." Pretty much, which is a shame, because I think he does have some decent points to make in regards to the SA portion of MS Licensing 6.0. #19 Normally a good site, I just wish she'd focus more on the legal aspects of the SCO/the world cases. Her rants against MS et al get a trifle boring. |
| #9 By 19992 (68.169.46.164) at 4/8/2004 7:02:33 PM |
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#21 "Character assassination and lies are your only tactics ... "
First the lies How can they be my lies if all I have done is quote Didio? http://cio-today.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Yankee_Group__Linux_Is_No_Bargain&story_id=23611 "As might be expected, report author and senior analyst Laura DiDio is drawing a lot of heat, with some questioning sponsorship of the survey, as well as her motives. She told NewsFactor that it was an independent effort that included two-dozen interviews with CIOs and other high-level corporate officials." Second the Character Assassination I'm not sure I would call pointing out flaws in a published report character assassination. When the same journalist makes the same idiotic mistakes over and over again, the reputation of that journalist is going to decrease. You don't like Didios' image? Write to her and ask her to start putting out papers without an agenda. Third. Your silly arguments Trying to back up your claims of a papers accuracy with more quotes from the same article isn't what I would call "backing up your position with facts". I'm sure the paper has some good points to make, but they are buried in with so many inaccuracies and falsehoods that they will be difficult to weed out. |
| #10 By 19992 (68.169.46.164) at 4/9/2004 11:33:38 PM |
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Parker
You stated in comment #23 "And the article you try and use to smear the report, has quotes from OSS "experts" agreeing with the report: "Jeff Bates, director of OSDN (Open Source Development Network) online and executive editor of Slashdot.com, who said that replacing any operating system with another would be more expensive than upgrading. " " While I had already stated in comment #15 "Absolutly correct. It does cost more money to migrate to a new platform than it does to upgrade. That's a given. A migration is also not the full measure of TCO." Besides, agreeing with a point or two in a report does not mean you agree with the entire report. Your point on this is absolutely meaningless. "An honest person would note that 1000 companies were "surveyed", and the effort also "included two-dozen interviews"." You are correct, an honest person will also admit when they are wrong. I misread/misremembered the article. "An OSS fanboy, trying to smear the report, would claim that an interview and a survey are the exact same thing. They aren't. There were 1000 companies surveyed, and 24 interviewed face to face." Never said an inteview and a survey were the exact same thing. Show me where I said that. Also, I believe you can now count yourself as an OSS fanboy. "You are a liar. And you have nothing of substance to contradict the report." Right, Name one software company that offers indemnification of a national disaster. And you want to talk to me about honesty? Try this on for size "The larger problem is that all 1,000 of the respondents were drawn from the Win2Knews mailing list which is constituted predominantly of and designed for pro-Windows NT/2000 system administrators and power users." Yep, that's a good way to get good clean honest results. Identify a user base that is less likely to have exposure to Linux and ask them which is cheaper. What's more have the survey and interviews conducted by a Microsoft Gold Partner. You've got some very nice attempts of redirection and personal attacks in your responses. But I've seen nothing from you to convince anyone of the integrity of the report. I'll state this one more time, I'm sure the paper has some good points to make, but they are buried in with so many inaccuracies and falsehoods that they will be difficult to weed out. Oh a word of advice, try to keep personal attacks out of this, it just makes you look juvenile. This post was edited by happyguy on Saturday, April 10, 2004 at 00:04. |
| #11 By 12071 (203.217.78.243) at 4/10/2004 2:24:29 AM |
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#26 "RedHat isn't free."
Which RedHat did you mean? The last version of RedHat was 9.0, this can be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/ Maybe you meant the newest "RedHat" which is Fedora and can be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/iso/ Or perhaps you meant RedHat Enterprise, in which case v3.0 can be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/3/en/os/i386/SRPMS/ All the patches, updates and bug fixes can also be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: RedHat v9.0: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/9/en/os/i386/ Fedora: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/ RedHat Enterprise v3.0 AS: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/3AS/en/os/SRPMS RedHat Enterprise v3.0 ES: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/3ES/en/os/SRPMS RedHat Enterprise v3.0 PW: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/3PW/en/os/SRPMS RedHat Enterprise v3.0 WS: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/3WS/en/os/SRPMS *Note: RedHat Enterprise only includes the source code, rather than the pre-built binaries, so you will have to compile it yourself, however that doesn't change the fact that you CAN get it for free. The only things not included are any commerical products included and support. However you can download cAos' CentOS-3 (see below) saving you the time to compile all the source code. **Note: I've just provided links to the latest versions, you can download all the previous versions as well as the versions for other platforms as well. ***Note: You can save yourself time and effort by using up2date or yum or apt to get all the updates for you =) "SUSE isn't free." SUSE v9.0 can be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.0/ SUSE v9.0 Live Evaluation can be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/live-eval-9.0/ All the patches, updates and bug fixes can also be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) here: http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/updates/90_i386.html or ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/update/9.0/ Some other distributions of Linux such as Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Mandrake, Knoppix, Yellow Dog, cAos etc etc can all be downloaded for free (as in speech and beer) in similar ways! If anyone is wondering cAos linux (http://caosity.org/) is "an enterprise level distribution rebuilt from Red Hat Enterprise Linux source RPMs. The release [CentOS-3.1] includes all security updates for RHEL released by 18th March. Updates should be available within hours after released on the RHEL Eratta page. CentOS-3 also now includes the RHEL documentation, both on the CDs (CD3/docs) and also on the mirrors in the 3.1/docs/ directory". This means that if you want RedHat Enterprise v3, including all the latest patches and updates and you don't want to compile it yourself... you're in luck! All that work has been done for you! Enjoy! No amount of FUD from the MS camp will change the fact that Linux is FREE! This post was edited by chris_kabuki on Saturday, April 10, 2004 at 02:27. |
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