By Jo Best, 17 November 2004 14:35
NEWS Microsoft's dominance in operating systems will continue - though only for the next few years.
According to Mark Russinovich, co-author of Microsoft Press' Windows Internals and Inside Windows 2000, Microsoft will preserve its software dominance over alternatives such as Linux for the next two to four years, chiefly because the open-source community doesnt have the same cash and resources to tap up as the world's largest software company.
Windows "still has a much more focused organisation looking at high performance", Russinovich said at this week's Microsoft IT Forum event in Copenhagen.
"Linux improvements are advancing quickly," he said, but added: "Linux efforts are kind of all over the place - each vendor, like IBM, has its own Linux labs," which don't have the same scope or time to devote to boosting performance benchmarks over time.
He also added that budget constraints are an issue, citing the example of the Open Source Development Labs' $10m budget. In contrast, Microsoft has poured $6bn into research and development this year across all its operations.
That figure may well narrow over time but for open source to raise its game further for enterprise use Russinovich believes the issue of backward compatibility will have to be tackled. "Linus has no problem breaking backward compatibility in device drivers," he said, adding that created a "big problem" for companies today.
System administrators don't want to be recompiling code when a new kernel comes out, Russinovich said.
Jean-Philippe Courtois, CEO of Microsoft EMEA, repeated the company's stance on competition, saying it is good for Microsoft.
"We're serious about Linux," he told silicon.com.
"There's pressure from competition, absolutely [but] competition really provokes our best innovation," he added, claiming the dynamic of discussions on Linux versus Windows has changed. "It's much less emotional... it's becoming more rational," he said.
Comments
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1. Pablo D
Just as Microsoft has trouble tracking the real progress of Linux (how do you count software that never shows up in anyone's financial statements, for example, such as all the copies of Linux built from the original source and not purchased through a distro?), I doubt that anyone has a true handle on the resources that go into Linux. My guess is that by the time you add them all up, they actually exceed the resources that go into Windows. One example: profit margins for Microsoft's Windows division are around 90%, and annual revenues are around $10B, which means that MS actually spends about $1B a year developing Windows. IBM has put $1B a year into Linux. HP says it put $2B into Linux one year. And that doesn't count the hundreds of other people, some of them very highly skilled, who maintain other parts of the system. So picking out only the OSDL is picking out just one of the smaller investments in Linux development.
2. Lindsey Rockwell
Microsoft knows well that all "sales" figures are far too low on any Linux dstro. The real - per machine - deployment is much larger than any of Gartners or Forrester alike will ever know.
Microsofts dollar billions don't matter when it comes to security, stability, expandability and not the least usability.
Just got ready with an installation of a simpler e-mail cluster with Courier, Exim and MySQL for some domains, all powered by Debian Linux. The price?
You guess!
Lindsey
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3. Alan Chandler
Isn't this just FUD at its best.
Comparing ODSL's $10m budget with Microsofts $6bn draws the reader into assuming that these two function do the same thing.
But in reality Microsoft $6bn encompasses ALL of its software development. On the linux front, many developers are not related to ODSL and certainly aren't paid for them. So why the comparison?
Most of the other comments are in a similar vein.
4. Cristian Nicola
Just a quick question for Lindsey Rockwell: any idea how many licenses agreements have you broken with your instalation if the guessed cost would be nil?
Pablo D: most of the work done by "professionals" in the linux world is done in free time. Which means is neither complete nor polished enough. The "billions" of script kiddies that call themselves programmers do not really count as they only make matters worst, hence why there is virtually no compatibility between 2 versions of whatever "open source" product.
The reality is for anything which is not a simple server windows is much better than linux (please do not confuse unix with linux).
Finally just to not create any flames - i'm not a fan of windows myself, but the alternatives are very close to none...
5. Brad K
Christian, you haven't ever installed desktop linux, have you? We are 100% Linux-based, from desktops to servers in our company and no-one would have it any other way. Linux doesn't only work well on the desktop in the enterprise, it is a massive step forward thanks to the flexibility of the X11 system that allows for remote diagnostics, multiple desktops and shared resources.
Windows, even the lasted incarnations, has a huge way to go to catch up.
I laughed at the M$ comments about driver backward compatibility. Just ask anyone who has upgraded from previous versions to W2000 and then again to WXP about drivers being broken! What a cheek Microsoft has! Plays on the ignorant.
6. Goten Xiao
If anything, Linux is *more* backward compatible. They still have drivers for the ancient video cards (with Slackware at least - this is the other thing MS conveniently ignores; your Linux experience changes from distro to distro).