The Truth about Microsoft

Scalability?

Reliability? Manageability?

"The only thing in my lab that approximates [a trasaction-rich environment] was the Internet News server that was, until recently, running alongside the NEC, handling a small subset of Usenet newsgroups and a few local discussion groups. That, it seems, was too Herculean for NT to handle. Yes, part of the fault lies with me --- I had only configured the system with a single partition (with disk mirroring). And yes, I made the mistake of not checking my E-mail over a weekend. When I returned to the lab on Monday, the server's drives were full, and the system had locked up. But this was more than just a simple drive space problem. Somehow, while in search of a sector to write to, NT had overwritten its own boot sectors, so I wasn't able to get the system to reboot. Of course, the boot sector was overwritten on the mirrored drive, too. So my News server had transformed over the weekend into a high-availability, fault-tolerant paperweight. Mission ciritical? Not!"

---Sean Gallagher, "Tech View", Information Week, 12 January 1998, p.64

"How Do You Manage A Remote NT Server?" Reboot it.

---Advertisement for a remote power control box from Server Technology, Inc.

Another reader noted the greater overall cost of building a truly personal operating environment with the shallow Windows Explorer shell. ``Tasks that I had easily automated using the base features of OS/2 Warp Connect are impossible without hundreds of dollars' worth of additional software for NT.''"

---Peter Coffee, PC Week, 3 March 1997, p.53

"Many [readers] confirmed that in mixed environments, Macs require a tine fraction of the support demanded by Windows PCs. Typical was the help desk specialist at a major federal agency. Almost half of the agency's machines are Macs, but he handles those with half of his time and does Web site work for the rest of the day --- while four other technicians spend all of their time on Windows. ... The final story comes from a state government office in the Midwest, where two departments each have about 200 employees distributed state-wide. One department uses Macs, with a single person handling all installations and user support. The other uses PCs and Windows with a staff of six and almost five times the cost per computer --- and with substantial backlogs for handling users' requests."

---Peter Coffee, PC Week, 5 May 1997, p. 47

"I can count on one hand the number of NetWare server crashes in one year. However, I cannot say the same for NT. NT servers are extremely unreliable (running on the same hardware as NetWare.) By switching to NT, you can ... count on doubling your support staff just to keep the things running.... I laugh at all the weekends and nights [my brother] works because of his crashing NT servers. But the executives at his company are convinced that Novell is going out of business, so they went all-NT. Another victim of Microsoft marketing."

---Greg Bednorski, reader mail to PC Week, 19 January 1998, p. 73

"In digital media production, Macintosh users generate a greater return on investment than their Windows-using counterparts.... Mac users in the digital media sector... produce an average of $26,441 more annual revenue and $14,488 more net profit per person than Windows users of comparable skill, engaged in similar work.... The researchers say they polled 30,226 media professionals and 10,000 media production companies... The revenue differential lets Mac-based digital media production studios achieve payback on new desktop systems in less than five months the report says. Windows NT-based companes require at least a year to recoup their investments."

---Rich Levin, Information Week, 28 July 1997, p. 127

"User processes have a higher CPU scheduling level available than the scheduler itself promotes processes to, thus a user process can lock the machine (taking 100% CPU)."

---http://www.cck.uni-kl.de/~jmaurer/winnt.html

Proprietary

"Before people can like Microsoft, they have to like Microsoft's products. And before they can like Microsoft's prodcuts, they need to understand how they work. All the wealth being stockpiled by the multitude of Windows consultants out there is no match for the loyalty of a billion end-users with a reliable and easily accessible place to go for help"

---Joel Scambray, "Loose Cables", InfoWorld, 12 January 1998

Best in Class Mediocrity

Microsoft had to license multi-user technology from Citrix. After 4 versions of NT, they still hadn't built a multi-user OS in-house.

The registry is a hodgepodge of OS, hardware, and application configuration options. You can't easily isolate all the application configurations to copy them to a new machine. Keys have no comments and there are unadvertised keys to change defaults. Anyone who complained that UNIX configuration files in /etc with plain-text comments and sensible names where hard to find will just love the Registry.

Microsoft's first telnet daemon for Windows NT came with an optional Resource Kit for NT Server 4.0 and was a beta version even then.

---Lab Note, PC Week, 2 December 1996, p. 83

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."

---Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, p. 265.

1997 Best Technical Support Award: Linux user community
1997 Network Operating System Product of the Year: Red Hat Linux 5.0
"Find out what you've been missing while you've been rebooting Windows NT."

---InfoWorld, 2 February 1998

Mindless Marketing

"The basic idea of...you know, operating systems, we're going to keep innovating in operating systems. We spend a billion dollars a year just innovating operating systems. And people are asking for a lot of stuff. Take TCP/IP stacks--they didn't used to be part of the operating system. You used to go out and pay money. And there were 11 companies that were in the business of selling you TCP/IP stacks. Now this was ugly. Some interoperated with some, they hadn't done DHCP, it wasn't optimized. So what did we do? We listened to our customesr and they said "This is screwy. Put a good TCP/IP stack in the operating system." We did, we integrated that in. That's called innovation."

---C/Net, Interview with Bill Gates, 3 October 1997.

"We can't let the creators of this technology lead and the world follow blindly... We should not allow ourselves to be intimidated by some technology companies."
"Technology for technology's sake is not innovation. What we in the industry have to be concerned about is what products do, as opposed to what the processing power is."
The operating system should be "hidden away" so users can do their work instead of spending 27 percent of their time just fiddling with Windows.

---Ted Waitt, Chairman & CEO of Gateway, Perspectives, CNET NEWS.COM, 23 May 1997

"Enter Microsoft Windows. It enabled a whole new generation of innovations.... The Windows operating system transformed the PC into the ultimate network computing device. People were suddenly empowered to do far more, better and faster."

---Microsoft advertisement, "In the beginning there was a pencil.", 1997

"After more than a year of ridiculing network computers, Microsoft is preparing to enter the NC market with that CEO Bill Gates calles ``Windows terminals.''" Bill also stated that the Windows terminal "is the only true thin client."

---Stuart J. Johnston, "Microsoft Readies `True Thin Client'", Information Week, 14 April 1997, p.118

"First, there is a notion that the larger consumer group should take a large part in computer business decisions - and hence product decisions. Second, purchasing decisions in companies thus become strongly influenced by a group who might not focus in on the scalable, big-picture concerns that the technical people think are most important. Inability to evaluate the technology beyond the demo (or marketing hype) quickly leads to the situation best described in the Bill-Gates-visiting-hell joke. The subtle points of computer capabilities and performance become lost."

---Rob Kolstad, Editorial, ;login:, December 1996, p. 1

"It's not as simple as sitting down at an IE4 machine. We've tried it on several [machines] and we get a crash but that's it, which is certainly not a security hole."

---Harry Goodwin, Microsoft regarding a buffer overflow attack in the HTML parser of IE, http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/8429.html

Strategy to Rule the World

Microsoft wanted to charge a transaction fee for all Internet transactions made with its software.

---Infoworld, 12 January 1998, p.10

"Win95B also includes a few maddening bugs. Notable among these is OSR2's incapability to dual boot between Win95B and an older version of DOS. You also cannot run Windows 3.x in DOS mode using Win95B.... These two failings of Win95B are all the more galling because they aren't really accidental bugs. They are bugs that were deliberately introduced into Win95B as ``features'' to interfere with your use of older software.... In any case, creative programmers around the world have taken up the challenge and fixed both of these failings."

---Brian Livingston, InfoWorld, 19 January 1998

Microsoft announced that they will refuse to support NT customers who install a single Novell NDS DLL on their server.

---Emily Fitzloff, "Microsoft shuts out NDS", InfoWorld, 19 January 1998, p.1

"In a letter to the Department of Justice and in press releases issued last week, Microsoft officials said IE 3.0 is an integrated component of the Windows 95 operating system, as shipped in the OSR (OEM Service Release) 2 version of Windows 95. They further asserted that removing certain IE DLLs (dynamic link libraries) from OSR2 would render the operating system unbootable. Our tests of Windows 95 OSR2 show that this not the case. Using copies of OSR2 CDs provided with OEM PCs, we merely modified four lines in one of the Windows 95 setup files to prevent IE 3.0 from installing. This modification had no impact on the operating system's capabilities or peformance. Instead of the install script overwriting Windows 95 DLLs with files from IE 3.0, the original Windows 95 DLLs remained intact. In addition, significant OSR2 features such as the FAT32 file system remained intact using our modified installation program.... Removing IE 4.0 from Windows 98 in particular eliminates the very features that will incur the most costs in a corporate setting: Active Desktop, Active Channels and the Web-based Windows System Update."

---Michael Caton, "`Integrated' IE is Easy to Bypass", PC Week, 22 December 1997, p. 18