MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-02-13 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Know your enemy
|
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,885490,00.asp
February 12, 2003 Gates Taking 'Pervasive' Linux Seriously By Peter
Galli
Microsoft Corp. Chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates on
Tuesday weighed in on the threat the Linux operating system poses to his
company's business, saying he is taking the threat seriously as Linux is
"out there and very pervasive."
Addressing more than 600 of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professionals
(MVPs) from around the globe at the Redmond, Wash., campus, Gates said
that during other points in Microsoft's history there had been
technologies that people said were going to kill the company.
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"OS/2 for about six years was that. And it wasn't a joke; it was all of
IBM that was 10 times the size of Microsoft putting all their energy,
their leverage on ISVs, bundling it with their systems, everything they
could do to beat Windows, and we as a company had to learn new things,
do new things to respond to that competition," he said.
But Linux is an "unusual kind of competition because in a way it's out
there and very pervasive. In a way, there's more incompatible versions
of Linux than there are of all other operating systems put together.
That is, as people do innovations on top of Linux, they don't all get
tested together and they're not all consistent with each other," Gates
told the MVPs.
Microsoft Filing Advises of Price Cuts Microsoft Hosts 670 MVPs at
Summit Microsoft Warns SEC of Open-Source Threat Microsoft Gives Peek at
Financial Forecast Microsoft Issues Dividend, Splits Stock
As a result, there are things that the free model is never going to do
well, whether it is testing or support or innovations where a risk has
to be taken across all the boundaries of the different modules. That
kind of testing, that uniformity, is done well by commercial software
companies. As an example, Gates cited the development of the Tablet PC,
where there had to be a handwriting group, an Office group and a user
interface group, all coordinated into one step.
"It's almost like a 747 where, yes, it's easy to do a wing, it's easy to
do a tail, but to produce a wing and a tail that work together under all
conditions, that's tough, and that's the position we're in," he said.
Linux today is basically Unix, what Unix has always been, Gates said,
adding that Microsoft has been competing with Unix for a long time. One
of the things Microsoft has done in response to that was to build a Unix
compatibility layer, in its Services for Unix product. "It's really
quite amazing because it actually emulates different flavors of Unix,
and it's getting richer and richer," he said.
As people move off proprietary Unix systems and onto X86 hardware, they
must decide whether to run Windows or Linux. Microsoft shows those
customers what its value proposition is, such as the rich layers and
support Windows has, like Active Directory, and management.
The real comparison is between Linux with WebSphere and Windows: compare
the price, compare the architectural coherence, the richness of the
development tools and/or performance, Gates said. "That will be a very
dramatic contrast; our price is still way lower than what you're going
to have to do with those others.
"So it's great. There's always been people who thought the Macintosh
would take over, that Netscape would take over. Network computers,
remember all those ads and those poor customers who bought those things?
So we take it seriously. I'm not trying to make light of it. I never
made light of OS/2," Gates said.
His comments follow the company's recent 10-Q quarterly filing with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, where Microsoft cautioned investors
that it may in the future be forced to lower its software prices as a
result of the growth of open source.
Microsoft said in the filing that the popularization of the open-source
movement continues to pose a significant challenge to its business
model. This threat includes "recent efforts by proponents of the open
source model to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of
open source software in their purchase and deployment of software
products. To the extent the open source model gains increasing market
acceptance, sales of the company's products may decline, the company may
have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and
operating margins may consequently decline," it said.
But Gates on Tuesday said Microsoft is "driving the frontiers of
software, driving quality-type work and new scenarios," adding that its
software could actually save customers more than the 2 percent or 3
percent cost to their IT budgets that Microsoft software represents.
Microsoft's software now administers those systems and keeps them up to
date and tracks them. "So, the net cost effect, as I said, has got to be
this dual thing of more capability and a net savings in terms of overall
IT spending," Gates told the MVPs. -- __________________________
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