
Last week, Microsoft and Unysis launched an $30 million anti Unix campaign at
http://www.wehavethewayout.com claiming that Unix is outdated, inflexible, way too complex and can only be used my computer experts who cost a lot, and that Windows is far better. soon after it launced though, a site called NetCraft (http://uptime.netcraft.com ) which tracks servers soon found out that the site was running on FreeBSD, a free open source version of Unix, and Apache server (very popular open source server software)!!! So of course when Microsoft heard about this, they quickly switched over to Windows NT and IIS, MS's server software, causing downtime for almost a day! also it was recently found out that they're using MySQL (open source) for the site database, not Microsoft's SQL server. The site has completely backfired on them, causing lots of embarrassment, news stories all over and various spoof sites (like http://wehavethewayin.com )
the other story I read is about Microsoft not being able to sucessfully use their own products: (story from link at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/24714.html )
Dr. Frank Soltis, the IBM engineer who has been called "the AS/400's Elvis," recently shared a success story during a keynote speech at a user conference in Florida. This particular company was in the software distribution business and at one point had 23 AS/400s located around the world. The company was a very good customer, went from CISC to RISC, and was always one of the first to upgrade to new technology, he said. Then came the Year 2000 problem, and despite five years of dedicated service during a period of great revenue growth, the company decided that it was time to move off the AS/400. So in June of 1999, the company unplugged its AS/400s and powered up 1200 NT servers it needed to replace them. But things didn't quite go as planned. "They found they couldn't make it work," Soltis told the crowd. "Today, one year after unplugging their AS/400s, they're back on the AS/400." That company is Microsoft. "They viewed that as a point of embarrassment," Soltis said. "We thought it was kind of fun....Can you think of a company with greater incentive to move to NT, and they couldn't do it?"
- David

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