Sorry.. I was doing well for a while pulling all the relevant links together about Linux making headway worldwide, then I got waylayed.
I've come out of retirement because of THIS monstrosity of an ad which I increasingly see coming up on Linux related pages. I hate advertising like this that is designed to confuse, but just incase you missed it:
1) When they say "State Government" what they really mean is one guy ( who NO LONGER works for state government ) said this.. not that this is the position of "state governments".
2) If you dig a bit deeper you'll find that perhaps MS should have quoted around something a little safer. This article details the gray areas around the claims and how that very state government is floundering around trying to find someone who can actually prove the claim.
3) As far as I can tell, all this hype is around "messaging". The claim is a saving of over $10M over 5 years. I think we are talking about a massive Exchange Server installation here.
So what to make of it? Well from my perspective Paul Campbell is an idiot if he REALLY said what they say he did.. that he didn't choose linux as a server technology because he didn't have time for a "science project", or to TRAIN people.. yeah.. like Exchange Server is the simples piece of software on the planet and can be administered by your average IT intern.
If they could save $10 by using Exchange, just THINK what they could have saved if they'd used Zimbra to get the same features! Server savings alone would be astronomical, but on top of that, all the potential savings from not having to splash out on MS Office for every employee and their dog, as Zimbra is much more generically supported across PCs, Macs and Linux desktop clients as I've discussed here.
Anyway - it pissed me off.. so here I am. Go check it out yourself. I'd give you the link, but better still go to http://www.osnews.com and you'll find the ad on pretty much any linux related page.
Click it and let Microsoft pay for their propaganda campaign.
Oh.. Getting Dugg very nicely.. Hi Diggers!
I just noticed one of my older posts about Illinois:
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/18720.html
Quote: "anville School District 118, located in neighboring Illinois, has taken their Linux desktop savings one step further. By pioneering Omni's "Multiplied" SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop Strategy, Danville School District 118 has reduced their hardware costs by 50%, their electricity costs by 62%, and saved the district thousands of dollars on costly Internet drops, switches, network wiring and other infrastructure and support costs."
Microsoft didn't mention this ;-)
16 comments:
Awesome article! You got friends over @ AskTheAdmin.com.
And they say ignorance is bliss...
That's funny Microsoft I work for a State government and we can't wait to get off the Microsoft Operating System. We are moving to Zimbra (it will be on Ubuntu Server) for email, and Ubuntu on the desktop. We just got finished with the pilot to move our web application server to websphere running on SUSE enterprise 10. I'm going to the largest State Court conference this week in Tampa, Fl. Guess what Microsoft? This year the big talks are all about saving money and being more secure with Open Source. And no one is talking vista migration....get your facts right Microsoft and stop with the FUD.
I wrote an entry in my blog on the exact same ad here (complete with screen shot) back on September 13th. There's no telling how long this has been going on. And like you it pisses me off. Royally.
Shouldn't someone tell them (MS) that it's almost 2008?
Yes, dirty rotten monopolist's ill-gotten warchest used to pollute upstanding linux pages up and down the tubes of the internets...
But if you click every such ad (just once or systems like adwords will likely deem you "click fraud" and ignore your clicks), you're likely moving some money (likely on the order of a penny but with enough people clicking...) from m$ to the linux page's sponsor, and really, what could be better than that? Turn that internet eyesore into a "robin hood" style opportunity!
Let's poke some holes in that warchest:
CLICK THOSE M$ ADS!
Man this ticks me off. But hey, if you cant win, fight dirty. Lets just hope it doesn't set linux and the popular market back by a few.
yeah well, anybody surprised? Just read where Vista is the most stable Operating System ever produced. Not the most stable microsoft ever made( and that would be a lie, we all know), but the most stable ever, by anyone. Hey I consider it's just a little Daily Show logic available on the weekends.
Ted
Wow, the Microsoft marketing machine seems to be suffering from multiple personality disorder. Here they spread FUD about Open Source in Government, but they are a gold level sponsor of the Government Open Source Conference.
And not all state government distrusts Linux. The Vermont Department of Taxes uses Debain for some things. Read about it here.
Just wait until ReactOS gets out of Alpha stage....Microsoft will probably be pulling strings to call it copyright infringement, and similar "security" type ads to slander as well.
In my opinion, Microsoft has outgrew it's britches, and needs to be smacked around a bit. Free O/S flavors are starting to arise, and all Microsoft has is an unstable OS which needs so many patches before it will operate anywhere as efficiently as Linux, or even ReactOS (alpha)
Microsoft needs to learn, now the "perfection" of an OS has nothing to do with how much it costs. Linux also has one advantage for saving companies a lot of money, it doesn't require the highest specs to run JUST THE OS!
All this will do is make more people aware of Linux. Many people that haven't heard about it will soon find themselves researching it. Thats what happened to me, and i have completely converted now.
Only the stripped-down version of Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter) is free. If they want to truly enjoy the benefits of free software they should go with Citadel which provides all the same features but is end-to-end GPL.
This is why FSDail.com has a no MS ads policy.
Weird. Just clicked on about 25 linux-related pages on osnews.com and couldn't raise the ad in question.
D'you suppose they figured it out and pulled the ad from there in that short time?
Any other places it's been seen?
It appears Microsoft marketing expects that we will be awed by the word "govenrnment" and not seek more specific information. It looks as though Paul Campbell has less integrity than Steve Balmer when looking more closely.
Microsoft may as well ally themselves publicly with shelleytherepublican.com
Shelley's primary Linux basher is from the Tuttle Oklahoma "government" school of IT. You may remember another Tuttle genius, Jerry Taylor, who went ballistic at the CentOS folks for no intelligent reason.
Nice article!
http://www.infinitelyvirtual.com
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