Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

M$ ponders how to annihilate Linux

Filed under
Linux
Microsoft

THE THEME OF THE SALES keynotes at the MS WWPC was on how to sell: sell against Linux and sell to small businesses (SB).

The small business side had a new announcement, the Linux side was really light on ideas. There was also the usual sales cheerleading, but last time I talked about it, it was so sugary, it put three diabetic readers into a coma, about par for the course at a marketing conference.

Lets start with the good: the SB sector, something that has been largely ignored by larger vendors. There may be more money per account in a Fortune 500 business, but there are many more SB accounts. Part of the push today was to tap those accounts.

To do so, MS announced the Small Business Specialist, which is about what it sounds like. You need to get some training for the market, pass two technical tests and, from what I gathered at the keynote, you get a shirt proclaiming the achievement. Well, maybe you don't get a shirt, but they do exist. Meanwhile, the world gets people aimed at an underserved niche.

They also announced a bunch of mid-market initiatives, the one that stuck out is a new licensing model for the sector. While that is nothing new, they threw out the previous three models and replaced them with a single one called Open Value. You can spread payments over three years and, they said, there is a perpetual as well as rent-to-not-own model. The really great thing is they cut the contract down from 35 pages to five. And said they are vastly decreasing the time it takes to order the software.

One thing they kept talking about was reducing cost, and reducing the initial cost. Maybe I am reading to much into it, but I distinctly heard Orlando Ayala say, "We are too expensive," several times. With that, they went into a talk about MS financing, and from now to the end of September, they will finance you for 101%, IE you finance through MS and you get a 1% kickback.

This all brings us to value, and something I didn't know or, at least, didn't realize. When talking about Linux, Kevin Johnson kept referring to the Get The Facts web site. They kept talking about how using the site and getting people, "engaged around Get The Facts". This would not bother me if they didn't keep referring to several thoroughly debunked, and mostly MS-funded studies. I was hoping for a real reason not to go for Linux, but nothing factual was presented, just spin. Color me stupid for expecting reality, but I didn't know how they used that site.

They did present a few interesting numbers though. First is a couple of winback case studies, with National Enterprise Systems and Independence Air named as now ex-Linux users. They also quoted some IDC numbers about shipments of Linux on x86 hardware, they showed MS at about 65% of the market in 2000 moving to about 75% in 2004. At the same time Linux went from about 10 to 15%. The take-home message was that partners can win against Linux, and it's growth is not at MS's expense. Without fine print, I can't go any deeper than that, but I am sure someone will it that after reading this.

Overall, for a pump-up, the resellers conference it was well done. The right things were said at the right times, and the sticky issues were glossed over. The only thing lacking was a coherent anti-Linux strategy. Maybe next year. µ

Source.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.