what the heck is this?

Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by Zulu-1, Oct 29, 2004.

  1. Zulu-1

    Zulu-1 Specialist

    hey guys.. i just got an email.. kinda weird eh? any ideas what this is? ;)

    email:

    From : Steve Ballmer <steveballmer@ceo.microsoft.com>
    Reply-To : "Steve Ballmer" <10_5584_id/IlGnN2+voW8VH6v4YmQ@ceo.microsoft.com>
    Sent : October 29, 2004 8:57:38 PM
    To : <my email :) @hotmail.com>
    Subject : Customer Focus: Comparing Windows with Linux and UNIX




    In the thousands of meetings that Microsoft employees have with customers around
    the world every day, many of the same questions consistently surface: Does an
    open source platform really provide a long-term cost advantage compared with
    Windows? Which platform offers the most secure computing environment? Given the
    growing concern among customers about intellectual property indemnification,
    what's the best way to minimize risk? In moving from an expensive UNIX platform,
    what's the best alternative in terms of migration?

    Customers want factual information to help them make the best decisions about
    these issues. About a year ago, a senior Microsoft team led by General Manager
    Martin Taylor was created to figure out how we could do a better job helping
    customers evaluate our products against alternatives such as Linux/open source
    and proprietary UNIX. This team has worked with a number of top analyst firms
    that have generated independent, third-party reports on cost of acquisition,
    total cost of ownership, security and indemnification. Some of the studies were
    commissioned by Microsoft, while others were initiated and funded by the
    analysts. In each case, the research methodology, findings and conclusions were
    the sole domain of the analyst firms. This was essential: we wanted truly
    independent, factual information.

    At the same time, our worldwide sales organization is going even deeper with
    customers to understand their needs and create a feedback loop with our product
    development teams that enables us to deliver integrated solutions that support
    real-world customer scenarios, and comprehensively address issues such as
    manageability, ease of use and reliability.

    I'm writing to you and other business decision makers and IT professionals today
    to share some of the data around these key issues - and to provide examples of
    customers who opted to go with the Windows platform rather than Linux or UNIX,
    and how that's playing out for them in the real world. Much more information on
    this is at www.microsoft.com/getthefacts.

    This email is one in an occasional series of emails from Microsoft executives
    about technology and public-policy issues important to computer users, our
    industry, and anyone who cares about the future of high technology. If you would
    like to receive these emails in the future, please go to
    http://register.microsoft.com/subscription/subscribeMe.asp?lcid=1033&id=155 to
    subscribe.

    TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP AND ACQUISITION COSTS

    In the past few years, you haven't been able to open a computing magazine or
    visit a technology Web site without running into an article about Linux and open
    source. Not surprising: who doesn't like the idea of a "free" operating system
    that just about anyone can tinker with?

    But as the Yankee Group commented in an independent, non-sponsored global study
    of 1,000 IT administrators and executives, Linux, UNIX and Windows TCO
    Comparison, things aren't always as they seem: "All of the major Linux vendors
    and distributors (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell [SUSE and Ximian] and
    Red Hat) have begun charging hefty premiums for must-have items such as
    technical service and support, product warranties and licensing
    indemnification."

    Yankee's study concluded that, in large enterprises, a significant Linux
    deployment or total switch from Windows to Linux would be three to four times
    more expensive - and take three times as long to deploy - as an upgrade from one
    version of Windows to a newer release. And nine out of 10 enterprise customers
    said that such a change wouldn't provide any tangible business gains.

    Yankee also noted that, for larger organizations with complex computer networks,
    it's important to look beyond Linux's initial low investment cost and consider
    all of the TCO and ROI factors.

    This is exactly what one of our large enterprise customers, Equifax, did
    recently. Equifax, a $1.2 billion U.S.-based enterprise with 4,600 employees in
    13 countries, needed more computing power than its mainframe systems could
    deliver for rapidly searching the company's vast marketing database. They spent
    several months conducting an internal analysis, which proved that, compared with
    Linux, Windows would realize a 14% cost savings and shorten their time to market
    by six months. (Equifax Case Study -
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15528)

    Another comprehensive, non-sponsored study by Forrester, entitled The Costs and
    Risks of Open Source, drew a similar conclusion: "The allure of free software is
    accelerating the deployment of open source platforms, but open source is not
    free and may actually increase financial and business risks."

    In early 2004, Forrester conducted in-depth discussions with 14 companies that
    had been running Linux platforms for longer than one year to see what the costs
    really were. Several key themes emerged:

    - Few companies know what they're really spending. Only five of the 14 kept
    detailed metrics - and each of those five found Linux more expensive (5% to 20%)
    than their current Microsoft environments.

    - Preparation and planning activities took 5% to 25% longer for Linux than
    Windows.

    - Training for IT employees was significantly higher for Linux than for Windows
    - on average, 15% more expensive. The reasons: training materials were less
    readily available, and customers spent more on training to compensate for the
    lack of internal knowledge about Linux.

    - All 14 companies said it was difficult finding qualified Linux personnel in
    the marketplace to support their Linux projects. When they did find third-party
    help, they had less leverage negotiating hourly rates than with Windows
    consulting resources.

    One of our mid-market customers, Computer Builders Warehouse (CBW), came to a
    similar conclusion. CBW builds computers to order for education, government, and
    corporate customers. Several years ago, it deployed Red Hat and Mandrake
    versions of Linux to support its corporate, retail and e-commerce applications.
    Challenged with high costs, CBW subsequently migrated to Microsoft Windows
    Server System, and reduced its total cost of ownership by 25 percent. It also
    consolidated its server population by 50 percent, reduced maintenance time by 50
    percent, and boosted developer productivity by 200 percent. These benefits -
    totaling $650,000 in savings - are dwarfed by the millions of dollars in new
    revenue that CBW expects as a result of bringing a key security and monitoring
    product to market more than two years faster than it could have done using
    Linux. (CBW Case Study -
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15131)

    SECURITY

    About three years ago, we made software security a top priority, and since then
    we've invested heavily in a multi-pronged effort to improve software quality and
    development processes, and to reduce risks for customers through education and
    guidance, industry collaboration and enforcement. I think it's fair to say that
    no other software platform has invested as much in security R&D, process
    improvements and customer education as we have at Microsoft.

    Still, Linux has often been touted as a more secure platform. In part, this is
    because of the "many eyeballs" maxim of open source software that claims a
    correlation between the number of developers looking at code and the number of
    bugs found and resolved. While this has some validity, it is not necessarily the
    best way to develop secure software. We believe in the effectiveness of a
    structured software engineering process that includes a deep focus on quality,
    technology advances, and vigorous testing to make software more secure.

    A number of third-party reports have questioned how safe the Linux platform
    really is. For example, a recent independent study by Forrester, Is Linux More
    Secure than Windows?, highlighted that the four major Linux distributions have a
    higher incidence and severity of vulnerabilities, and are slower than Microsoft
    to provide security updates.

    According to Forrester, Microsoft had the lowest elapsed time between disclosure
    of a vulnerability and the release of a fix. They found that Microsoft addressed
    all of the 128 publicly disclosed security flaws in Windows over the 12-month
    period studied, and that its security updates predated major outbreaks by an
    average of 305 days.

    Other independent sources of data show similar conclusions. According to
    statistics posted on the security Web site Secunia
    (http://secunia.com/product/2535#statistics_month), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
    has averaged 7.4 security advisories per month, compared with 1.7 advisories for
    Windows Server 2003.

    And as Yankee Group noted in its Linux, UNIX and Windows TCO Comparison study,
    "Linux-specific worms and viruses are every bit as pernicious as their UNIX and
    Windows counterparts - and in many cases they are much more stealthy."

    This was a deciding factor in farmaCity's selection of Windows over Linux.
    Headquartered in Buenos Aires, farmaCity is a rapidly growing Argentinean
    drugstore chain with 50 outlets and 1,200 employees. Although farmaCity's growth
    in recent years was a testament to its success, the company's aging technology
    infrastructure had become a hindrance to further expansion. After careful
    analysis, farmaCity concluded that Windows would reduce network administration
    by 30 percent compared with Linux, and would also simplify identity and desktop
    management. But the core reason for selecting Microsoft was the increase in
    network security, complemented by the ability to reduce patch-deployment time by
    50 percent while cutting unsolicited e-mail by half. (farmaCity Case Study -
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15269)

    INDEMNIFICATION

    Increasingly, we're hearing from customers that another factor in their
    consideration of computing platforms is indemnification. In 2003, we looked at
    our volume licensing contracts to see what we could do to increase customer
    satisfaction, and a top issue we heard about was patent indemnification, which
    then was capped at the amount the customer had paid for the software. So later
    that year, we lifted that cap for our volume licensing customers, who are most
    likely to be the target of an intellectual property lawsuit.

    Today, when a volume licensing customer - a business or organization ranging
    from as few as five computers to many thousands - licenses a Microsoft product,
    we provide uncapped protection for legal costs associated with a patent,
    copyright, trademark or trade secret claim alleging infringement by a Microsoft
    product. We do this because we are proud to stand behind our products, and
    because we understand that being on the wrong end of a software patent lawsuit
    could cost a customer millions of dollars, and massively disrupt their business.

    No vendor today stands behind Linux with full IP indemnification. In fact, it is
    rare for open source software to provide customers with any indemnification at
    all. We think Microsoft's indemnification already is one of the best offered by
    the leading players in the industry for volume licensing customers, and we're
    looking at ways to expand it to an even broader set of our customers. It's
    definitely something businesses want to think about as they're building or
    expanding their IT infrastructure.

    It was certainly a factor for Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie
    theatre chain in the world. In 2001, they moved to Red Hat Linux. After
    evaluating Linux in their business for several months, however, they migrated to
    the Microsoft platform - not only because of lower TCO, stronger support and
    services, and greater reliability and manageability, but because they were more
    fully indemnified on IP. J.E. Henry, CIO of Regal Entertainment, told me that
    "reduced risk was a decision factor in selecting Windows over Linux. We needed
    to minimize our exposure to the distraction of potential IP infringement claims,
    and we had a big enough open source presence to be concerned. With the way that
    Microsoft stands behind its products, it's one less thing that I have to worry
    about."

    UNIX MIGRATION

    One of the hot topics among enterprise IT and business decision makers today is
    the costs and benefits of migrating enterprise resource planning systems (ERP)
    from costly, proprietary UNIX environments to Windows or other platforms. ERP
    integrates various company functions such as human resources, inventories and
    financials, and links a company to its vendors and customers.

    An independent, qualitative survey of organizations that recently completed a
    migration of their SAP or PeopleSoft ERP system from a UNIX environment to the
    Microsoft Windows Server platform found a more than 20% reduction in the number
    of servers required compared with UNIX. The survey, by META Group, found that in
    one large telecommunications company, consolidation on Windows allowed a greater
    than 50 percent reduction in the number of required servers.

    The survey also found a more than 50 percent improvement in areas such as
    reliability, accessibility and scalability; significant savings in cost
    management, IT staffing, performance monitoring and vendor management; and
    measurable savings in technical support and training. More than half of business
    function decision makers also saw significant improvements in areas such as
    consistency, accuracy, reporting enhancement and performance.

    "Windows is now a mainstream option for the vast majority of ERP projects," META
    Group concluded.

    A great case study is the Raiffeisen Bank Group, the largest private bank group
    in Austria with about 2,600 branches. It wanted to reduce costs and provide
    better customer service by consolidating the number of servers in its branches
    by 50 percent. Raiffeisen investigated migrating from UNIX to either Linux or
    Windows. After evaluating the possible solutions, the company found that Windows
    Server 2003 would provide the most economical solution along with better
    performance, while giving bank employees an integrated view of customer
    information that they needed to improve customer service. (Raiffeisen Bank Group
    Case Study -
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15519)

    One of our mid-market customers had a similar experience. Grand Expeditions is a
    consortium of luxury travel companies that significantly reduced its Web
    development and hosting costs, and improved site reliability and performance, by
    moving from a combination of Linux- and UNIX-based servers to Windows Server
    2003 and the Windows Server System. The new system was up and running in just 60
    days, and is saving Grand Expeditions $200,000 a year. (Grand Expeditions Case
    Study -
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/facts/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?CaseStudyID=15397)

    IN CLOSING...

    There is no question that customers are benefiting today from a healthy,
    competitive IT industry. Competition requires companies to really focus in on
    what customers want and need. At the same time, customers have a clearer
    opportunity than ever before to evaluate choices.

    For example, BET.com, the Internet portal created by Viacom subsidiary BET
    Networks, did an in-depth comparison of Red Hat Linux and Windows Server System.
    They found that Windows offered 30% lower TCO, was more secure and reliable, and
    enabled quicker time to market. As BET.com's CTO, Navarrow Wright, said: "When I
    looked at all the costs - not just the straight price of software - a Windows
    Server System-based solution made better financial sense than sticking with our
    Sun and Oracle environment or switching to Linux. We decided to migrate the
    whole enterprise from various software vendors to standardize all of our
    software on Microsoft."

    By implementing Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, Office
    Professional Edition 2003, Exchange Server 2003, Content Management Server 2003
    and Visual Studio .NET 2003, BET.com conservatively estimated that its workforce
    will increase productivity by 25-30%, while saving significantly in licensing
    and redevelopment costs.

    As organizations increasingly rely on IT to perform mission-critical functions,
    and with complexity a growing challenge, choosing the right computing platform
    for the long term can make the difference between profit and loss, and between
    future success and failure. And it's pretty clear that the facts show that
    Windows provides a lower total cost of ownership than Linux; the number of
    security vulnerabilities is lower on Windows, and Windows responsiveness on
    security is better than Linux; and Microsoft provides uncapped IP
    indemnification of their products, while no such comprehensive offering is
    available for Linux or open source.

    The vision and benefits of an integrated platform are what distinguish
    Microsoft's approach to software. The Windows platform today offers an unmatched
    level of value, applications availability, simplicity, security and
    productivity. For Microsoft, this is truly a cross-company effort that requires
    the server and client operating systems to seamlessly deliver great usability
    and manageability features, applications that deliver compelling scenarios, and
    tools that enable developers and ISVs to easily and quickly build new
    applications on the platform.

    It's important that customers have all the information they need when making
    critical and expensive IT decisions. If the evidence at our
    www.microsoft.com/getthefacts Web site doesn't sufficiently convey the benefits
    and value of the Microsoft platform, we want to hear from you so we can work
    even harder to get that information to you. If you would like to have a more
    detailed discussion about your company's IT needs, email Martin Taylor at
    martinta@microsoft.com.

    Steve Ballmer

    Pour communiquer avec Microsoft, veuillez nous écrire à l'adresse One Microsoft
    Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052. Pour gérer vos abonnements de Microsoft.com,
    veuillez visiter le Centre d'information de Microsoft à l'adresse
    http://g.microsoft.com/mh_mshp/48. Si vous désirez lire la déclaration de
    confidentialité de Microsoft.com, veuillez vous rendre à la page
    http://www.microsoft.com/info/privacy.mspx.


    cheers


    :cool:
     
  2. MrPewty

    MrPewty MajorGeek

    Tell him you'll use Windows forever if he'll give you a million bucks. He can afford it.
     
  3. hithere

    hithere Staff Sergeant

    who's gonna read that long stuff anyway??? i know i didn't. what's it about?
     
  4. animatorStrike

    animatorStrike <a href="http://www.acrodata.com/fun/waaa.jpg">Rid

    Random inbox junk. I don't get it that much. ;)
     
  5. BLAJY

    BLAJY Corporal

    Read 3/4 and got bored. Maybe the brain can't handle all the techy talk. In any event, what are they paying their researchers? Or are they seeking "free" advice? All they have to do is load and operate any OS system themselves, and see. Is it that difficult?
     
  6. MartyP

    MartyP Private E-2

    This is easy, This is about prioritising your linux response with the UNIX for windows, for example if you use unix for certian precedures in certian windows platforms you will notice that the signatures are much different. Now if you have linux the Managibility does not come out to the same price ...its much higher. So if you or the customers take the amount and divide that in your email, the private policy reverses itself therefore taking you back to microsoft. Do not let this fool you though. If you take a percentage from unix platform you may even get a higher amount. The waranties of the other companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell [SUSE and Ximian] and
    Red Hat could cost more in the long run. Few companies know what they're really spending!According to Forrester. so all it is really saying is be careful. and use linux with your red hat for certain dos financial institutions.
    There much clearer
     
  7. eclayton

    eclayton Sgt. Shorts-cough



    ROFL!!! :D :D :D
     
  8. QuickSilver

    QuickSilver Corporal


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