*editorial note: the events described below took place in 2004

So I sat with about 150 other "technical decision makers" in a very

plush hotel in Holborn while representatives from Microsoft tried their

best to convince me that I should not be considering moving to Linux.

To run the discussion Microsoft had employed a fake-tan horror who had

clearly escaped from daytime TV. He was by turns chummy and

condescending. However being a reasonable man I will not hold Microsoft

responsible for his failings.

First up was Phillip Dawson who leads Linux research for

analysts Meta Group. He quoted heavily from a Meta analysis which shows

that Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for linux and windows is comparable.

This study has been widely reported in IT press but I can't for the

life of me find a link to the original. He made some interesting points

about where the datacentre is going to be in a few years. His basic

thrust was that everyone is moving from proprietary Unix with its

expensive platforms to Windows or Linux on x86 platforms and that it

this hardware move, rather than linux versus windows, that will drive

all the cost savings. Dawson believes that in a few years the only

place we will see proprietary Unix is in very large enterprise

databases.

After a promising start, Dawson then got into the territory of

why Windows makes more sense for enterprises than Linux. He introduced

what was to become a running theme for seminar, Linux is not free. It

turns out that the TCO statements made earlier were based on the

licensing costs of SuSE professional and Red Hat Enterprise versus

Windows. They had refused to consider that people might run a business

on something that they could download free from the Internet. Later in

the Q and A session Dawson got quite aggravated when people pointed out

to him that many Linux-based businesses run quite happily on free linux

(this was shouted by the scruffy-looking Debian hackers in the back). I

can only assume that businesses that are brave enough to save thousands

of pounds per unit by moving away from expensive hardware platforms are

meant not to care that they can save another couple of hundred pounds

on Microsoft licence fees. Later in the presentation he said "Don't

compare to the free downloads. They are not free". Precisely what he

meant by this escapes me.

One area the Meta study didn't look at was Linux on the

desktop. Phil claimed that linux was not ready for the desktop because

it lacked administrative tools. He was carrying on in a similar vein

when he said "Management tools on Linux are nearly as good as a DOS

prompt".

Nick Barley, business and Marketing Director for Microsoft UK took to

the stage to baffle us with market-speak. There was lots of talk about

strategy and leveraging which I didn't follow. He talked a bit about

Microsoft's shared-source program and tried his hardest to make it

sound like open-source, mainly by refusing to say Open-source and

talking about shared-source instead. Continuing in Phillip Dawson's

footsteps he repeated the mantra "Linux is not free" several times.

Although he was at his best when talking about business models amongst

Linux distributors claiming that "Linux is moving to the same model

that Microsoft has been using".

My absolute favourite part of the talk was when Barley started to extol

the virtues of Windows because everything in it was made by one

manufacturer. A fair point which would have been well taken had he not

gone on to draw an idiotic analogy. He asked us to imagine an aeroplane

where different components were made by different companies. Apparently

he's never heard of Airbus.

Next up was Nick McGrath head of platform strategy for

Microsoft UK. The main bulk of his talk was taken up by a demonstration

of a document sharing system based on Microsoft Sharepoint. Very boring

for those of us running heterogeneous systems that Sharepoint will not

run on. McGrath was much more technically clued up than Barley, and

seemed to be aware that the audience was not entirely on his side. He

made mention of the Forrester report

that claimed more vulnerabilities in Linux than Windows. I saw this

thoroughly debunked by RedHat's Marc Cox when he was speaking as part

of RedHat's World Tour so I will not go into further detail.

After a break for coffee Microsoft rolled out some satisfied

customers for us starting with Basil Shall of Grosvenor Group. For

those of you not familiar with Grosvenor they are a financial group who

use their massive London property holdings to make more money in the

markets. The most interesting thing that Basil said was that he had had

to write a letter to the head of Microsoft UK before he got decent

service. Things got progressively less interesting as the morning wore

on. Paul Hartigan of PharmiWeb told us how great .Net is. Anthony

Leaper of Seibel told us how great siebel is and how it runs just fine

on windows. Colin Bradford of Computacenter didn't really tell us

anything about Microsoft but did do an effective job of plugging

Computacenter's new testing facility where you can get suppliers to

show you real working systems of their latest and greatest

technologies.

The final part of the show was a Q and A session with the two

Nicks, Philip Dawson and Colin Bradford chaired by the aforemention

daytime TV horror-show. Eddie Bleasdale of Netproject

asked the most insightful question. He talked about a customer of his

who had lost data because it was in old Microsoft file formats that

couldn't be read by current Microsoft products. This was slickly dealt

with by McGrath who suggested that he should get the Microsoft people

to talk to him after the show. Barley added that all the current

Microsoft Office file formats including their XML schema are published

openly. I'm not entirely convinced of that but I don't know enough

about XML to make any definitive statements.

The overall tone of this event makes it fairly clear as to Microsoft's anti-Linux strategy.