Submitted by It was a long time in coming, but Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its anti-Linux site had gone past the point of usefulness. On August 23, Microsoft pulled plug on the ‘Get the Facts’ site, replacing it with a new Windows Server ‘Compare’ site. “The goal of the site is to offer more in-depth information and customer-to-customer opinions about many of the issues IT administrators face,” a company spokeswoman said. “It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people’s experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will also offer guidance around best practices, web casts, etc.”
I think that MS is realizing that *nix isn’t going away and companies need to be able to have the machines in their enterprise communicate and work together.
I don’t see this change so much as MS admitting that ‘get the facts’ failed, more that they have recognized that people are not going to simply choose windows over *nix and after the marketing propaganda is done they really need to offer solutions for their customers using *nix that work with windows.
When you look at the Compare Windows to Red Hat page, you’ll see they pluged almost the same crap that in there ‘Get the Facts’ site…
When you look at the Compare Windows to Red Hat page, you’ll see they pluged almost the same crap that in there ‘Get the Facts’ site…
Yes indeed. I did some more digging around and you are correct sir.
I guess its the same stuff with a new title.
“””
I guess its the same stuff with a new title.
“””
I haven’t bothered to look. But from the description, it sounds to me like the same old stuff with a new name and an astroturfing facility added.
For me, I think that comparision is stupid to begin with, because it isn’t a science. If you had 4 studies, each one would come up with a different result – its all opinion in the end.
What Microsoft should be doing is just put out the information, what features are in the products, the benefits of those features and allow the customer to make the decision based on the features/benefits provided.
Windows 2003 has made some inroads – it would be ignorant to claim that Microsoft is losing market share. If you look at the latest webserver results you’d know what I mean.
I also doubt that the ‘get the facts’ had any impact what so ever on the sales of Windows. I’m sure, like the ‘switch’ campaign by Apple pulled in new customers but it definately wouldn’t have balanced it self out with the costs associated with it.
Multimillion dollar purchases aren’t done on what so-and-so from some miscellaneous news outlet or what some so-called ‘independent third party’ opinion piece says about it. Its done on getting the software from Microsoft and doing their own internal review of it, testing in based on the numerous scenario’s that will appear when running in their organisation.
Gentlemen, the FUD is dead. Long live the FUD!
I’ve just gotta point this out to you readers @ osnews,
it’s funny really !
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3195
I’m printing it as we speak
cheers
anyweb
Edited 2007-08-24 23:53
I was just about to screeencap this myself. This is hilarious.
So FUD is dead, huh?
LOL
Nice, lol.
i can’t see it
Edited 2007-08-26 08:08
Do people really take this stuff seriously? I mean real people, not technology zealots that read OSNews.
As if you trust what a company has to say about its competition?
Just like to point to the image on the right hand side..
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/default.mspx
Shows a newspaper titled “The Highly Reliable Times” – Is that a joke or what? – it seems fairly lame – …. like “We THINK we are news but we are not, because no paper would publish it, so lets pretend they did and impress you with it”
Also, Is it just me or does the dude at the top of the screen look condescending.
I agree completely.
Any company that makes claims based on self-funded studies will always make me think the exact opposite of those studies’ results. For one thing, if those claims were true in a more objective, real-word setting, they could most likely be easily independently backed up. And anybody in marketing ought to know that independent claims carry much more water than any self-funded studies or self-published benchmarks. I mean, it sure looks better to say “X showed that our products are superior”, rather than “We showed our products were superior”. That’s common sense.
This isn’t just bashing MS. Apple is perhaps a bigger offender–hell, in my mind, they are master of the art of biasing facts: every new Mac is claimed to be exponentially faster than the last. At certain things on certain benchmarks, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean everything is twice as fast, as Apple tries to lead you to believe. Linux (not a specific distro) doesn’t really have spin doctors or marketing department, but their fanboys do a fine job of making up for it (and so do companies that develop and deploy Linux-based solutions).
Then there’s that dog food commercial, “In a Purina-funded study, dogs fed Purina Dog Cow over the course of a lifetime lived an average of two years longer.”
…o rly? I would have never guessed you’d come to that conclusion, especially not since your dog food is outrageously overpriced.
In the worlds of marketing and evangelism, everyone’s a sinner. If we tried to avoid those who made outrageous claims about their products and competition, we’d have next to nothing to use on our computers (or feed our dogs). We’d only be using the competition’s inaccurate claims and FUD to back up our biases, ignoring the claims and FUD made by our own kind. I know this from experience.
Oh, and “The Highly Reliable Times”? LOL, WTF. SO CHEESY. SOMEONE MAKE IT DIE, PLEASE.
Edited 2007-08-25 17:42
This does seem to be the same stuff from the old get the facts site. Infact, if you search for get the facts in the View Source, you actually find a reference to an image with an alt tag “Get The Facts”.
F*c&%k MS$$$ && closed sources forever !!!
I agree that they can be exasperating. I’ve been promoting and supporting competing OSes for 20 years, and believe me, I know. But get a grip! You can’t effectively promote your cause when you’re all wigged out about things.
… and I thought someone said no one would lose their job by selecting their products …
The server is not were Linux is getting interesting its the desktop.
Microsoft is gaining market share on the server and might surpass Linux someday but I don’t care.
I wont be manging servers for a living, so I wont be forced to learn Windows Server or anything like that. I’ll use whatever OS I want on my systems.
This new comparison site is single sided as usual. It only points out the advantages of Windows and none of that of Linux, Unix, or any other platforms. Of course those advantages aren’t universal nor solid facts in all or even many circumstances.
There are numerous case in favor of Linux that contradict those in favor of Windows. Therefore, neither are valid resources nor accurate. These studies are only accurate for a particular “case”.
Windows will never surpass Linux on the server, Linux will surpass Windows on the desktop
I wish
you wish
he she it wishes…
Microsoft’s website single-sided? Shocking! What kind of company is this?
JALC … Just Another Lying Company
That’s what you get when you combine centralism with lack of ethical standards. People have been so focused on the material values that they have forgotten what personal freedom is really about. Responsibility.
Unfortunately responsibility doesn’t make you rich, so most people try to forget that part. Incl. those in Microsoft.
I saw the demo video on Microsoft’s site and it was full of cryptic command-line commands. I didn’t see how their technique was any better, maybe even worse. That convinced me their real mission was to scare people away from command line interfaces.
Please don’t nuke me, but my operating system has a better command line interface than Linux or Windows. It’s C+ (more than C, less than C++). You can’t argue that command line interfaces which aren’t programming languages are as powerful as real programming languages. It also supports active links and graphics.
http://www.losethos.com
its creepy
Some of the best quotes on the site:
“The Microsoft ecosystem… provides customers with the most choice.”
“… with Linux, we didn’t get the reliability or flexibility we needed.”
However, my favorite is:
“Microsoft products are interoperable by design.”
I guess everyone DID get the facts. That is why they had to kill the site. Once you have the facts they don’t look very good.
Heh… in fact the site should have been called “Get the fiction”…
Doesn’t this just represent a change of name from ‘Get the facts’ to ‘Windows Server Compare’?
MS still seems to not realize that IT techs who are comfortable with *nix and MS offerings will choose the one that saves money while offering the features needed in a way that make sense for the particular purpose envisioned.
If they do, then they must think that IT professionals don’t understand Windows, but somehow are capable of understanding the, normally, more diverse *nix offerings.
That is kinda like saying I drive a stick shift ( manual tranny ), because I don’t understand automatics, while the opposite is the truth, it just so happens that a manual tranny(*nix) only does what you want, when you want, whereas an automatic (winders **) does what it wants, more or less when it wants, but is fairly predictable.
Sometimes you can’t rely on guess work, and you need to be certain things will happen in 3 ns or so ( impossible on Windows, BTW, with its 10ns+ process/thread granularity ).
It is a matter of the right tool for the job, about 90% of the time. Other times it is about saving money. MS can’t compete with that.
Otherwise, it doesn’t matter if the automatic has an overdrive and 3 real gears, when the manual has four real gears and no overdrive and costs less. From the user perspective its the same, from the mechanic’s perspective it is very much different, especially considering the manual is cheaper, more trustworthy, and gives you all the flexibility you’ll ever need.
Oh well, MS still doesn’t get the picture, but they are starting to get parts of it. If MS were to start offering all/some of their software on GNU/Linux, they may just be able to begin to understand what their customers actually want, which could allow them to improve their offerings.
Vista was a flop because it added junk nobody really wants. And, besides, just because I have a wide monitor doesn’t mean I want to use that extra space for nothing, I want to use it to show what I have always seen… in a larger area, rather than making something new to fill my extra space, negating my purchase’s actual purpose.
Oh well, let the one with the biggest pocket book lose touch ( as always ).
–The loon