Sunday 9 September 2007

Microsoft launch campaign worthy of a politician in it's vagueness

Hey, welcome to Linux Score Card 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 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:


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

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