So I saw that Microsoft is launching their anti-linux campaign, and wandered over to the website where could find the informative and completely unbiased reports. I picked one at random (“Lower Windows Staffing Costs Provide a TCO Advantage over Linux”) to read about how much cheaper an OS with client access licenses, no access to source code (for free anyway), no ability to modify it if needed and a price greater than $0 is so much better than say, that Linux thing.
First thing I see on the PDF:
An Assessment of Business Value for Selected Workloads
An IDC White Paper Sponsored by Microsoft Corporation
(Emphasis mine). Sounds as fair and biased as fox news. The next random pick was published by Microsoft, and the next one after that had “Test report prepared under contract from Microsoft“. I’m all for information, but you’d think that the “independant analyses” would be, well, independant.
Of course, whitepaper and studies can say whatever you want them too. My last contract passed on a white paper to me which did a similar study and showed that a Microsoft solution would add capital costs of $360,000 and support costs of over $700,000 per year. It’s almost like you can make numbers and situations say whatever you want them to! I’m sure that the folks over at slashdot have already roasted
this one to death though.
Maybe I’ll post it if I can get permission from the original author, if anyone would be interested that is.