Gillen [of IDC] also debunked one oft-touted advantage of open source: access to the source code. In practice, most companies lack the expertise to modify the code so this doesn't really help, he said. Therefore, The only advantage of open source software is reduced vendor lock-in, Gillen concluded.
“IDC was routinely hired by Microsoft to perform anti-GNU/Linux studies.”Last year, Peter Galli and Al Gillen tried to give readers the impression that "Linux is [was] Losing to windows." They spoke about servers in a pseudo (i.e. manufactured) debate.
It was the typical type of lie from eWeek (now bankrupt), where they cited the counting of preinstalls and revenue only. Peter Galli was more recently hired by Microsoft (seems like a 'reward' for his work), having spread such lies without any criticism or balancing act.
IDC was routinely hired by Microsoft to perform anti-GNU/Linux studies. In some well-documented court cases, it was also found that they not only counted the wrong thing (on purpose), but they and hid sponsorships or 'massaged' the results by bad tweaking of the candidate platforms. Ugly practices, no doubt.
A lot of people just parroted IDC's latest disinformation, which claimed GNU/Linux had mastered only 13% of servers. They deliberately measured the wrong thing without disclaimers or moderation, as pointed out in this podcast from last year. That who pays the bill also calls the shots and sets the rules. The Linux Foundation proved it. These analysts 'take turns', depending on who puts money on the table.
Here is a recent article that questions those figures from IDC, but can it actually deliver the truth?
Let's take a look at the Linux market. Linux has many things going for it, yet it makes up just 13.4 percent of total server revenue. (Don't forget, many servers run Linux but don't generate revenue for vendors.)
"Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he [Steve Ballmer] said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it. ... We have some work to do."
Yahoo joins Google in defending ad deal
[...]
"Here's the bottom line," Decker wrote late last week. "Yahoo will use this agreement to help us become a stronger competitor in all aspects of online advertising; and Yahoo is not exiting the sponsored search business. We plan to remain a strong player in sponsored search."
[...]
Early on, she takes issue with a statistic thrown around by Microsoft that the deal gives Google 90 percent share of the search-ad market, a statistic that derives from combining the two companies' individual share. "That's just plain wrong," she said. "It's important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to 'backfill' with Google ads if and when we see fit. The reason we structured the deal this way--rather than a more typical exclusive deal with revenue commitments to us and traffic commitments to Google--was precisely to avoid the issues the critics are raising."
August U.S. search share data shows ugly declines for Microsoft in 2008.
--Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Comments
Matt Asay
2008-10-01 19:14:13
This isn't cause for alarm: it means we've got a lot of market to clean up.