[Am-info] Looking at Ballmer's letter

[Gene Gaines]

Statement below is from Open Source Wall Street, by Dion Cornett.

I presume everyone has seen to cheap-shot, misleading
letter signed by Steve Ballmer that Microsoft sent to the world.

Gene Gaines
gene.gaines@gainesgroup.com
Sterling, Virginia



MSFT letter makes the case for Open Source

In an email to IT buyers last week, MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer
discussed why he believes MSFT solutions are better than Open
Source/Linux for companies migrating from UNIX. In spite of the
obvious reach such a public statement has, we believe it will
have limited impact on Open Source companies such as RHAT and
NOVL, and in fact may have the opposite effect of validating
Linux as a viable threat to MSFT=92s business. Mr. Ballmer quoted
data points including TCO/acquisition costs and security to make
his case, however, with slightly more than a superficial glance
at the sources Ballmer himself cited it=92s obvious he selected
portions of the data to make his case. Contrary to assertions in
the letter, the Forrester reports state that =93both Windows and
four key Linux distributions can be deployed securely,=94 and that
on certain metrics Windows wins and on others Linux wins. Aside
from that, the data is, by Forrester=92s own admission,
statistically insignificant, as they only interviewed 5
companies. In addition, Ballmer quotes a single metric from
security-tracking firm Secunia, that RHEL has 7.4 security
advisories per month and Windows Server 2003 has 1.7 advisories,
to prove that Windows is more secure, even though Secunia warns
that direct comparison of two products on this metric is
invalid, since, for example, RHEL includes numerous products
that are not bundled with Windows Server. Also, on deeper
inspection, of those advisories, RHEL has 0 of 92 unpatched and
of those 24% were highly critical, while Windows Server has 4 of
31 unpatched and 52% highly critical, and Windows XP has 19 of
74 unpatched and 37% highly critical. And, more importantly,
counts of security advisories alone do not provide an accurate
comparison as one single MSFT vulnerability from this summer
caused the US-CERT to advise users to stop using Internet
Explorer. In our view, Ballmer=92s memo simply highlights the
frustration that MSFT is feeling in finding a way to compete
with Linux, and if the =93independent studies=94 are as accurate as
Ballmer claims, then AOL (TWX: not rated), Amazon (AMZN: not
rated), Google (GOOG: not rated), and Linksys (CSCO: not rated)
- all companies that are standardizing on Linux =96 must be wrong
in how they operate their massive IT infrastructures. We believe
that pressure on MSFT is only going to intensify as Linux
matures and continues to evolve faster than Windows. We
reiterate our Outperform ratings on RHAT and NOVL.