Martin Taylor and Bill Hilf - Linux at Microsoft, Part I | TheChannel9Team

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

Beer, this one's for you! Smiley

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

In all fairness to Martin and Bill, I felt that they were doing more explination of differences than touting Windows as vastly superior in all respects.

rasx
Programmer/Analyst III, Emperor of String.Empty

Traditionally, Microsoft is the superior 'personal' or small-scale data management company. This is not very sexy superiority because most people are relatively sloppy with their small-scale data management. (And this includes large corporations on the department level.) What Microsoft should do is to try to make this stuff more sexy---promote the concept instead of products. This is much harder than making an iPod look sexy.

Over the last few years, Microsoft stock is like an index of technology stocks: it is investing in everything technology money can buy---including tera-byte-level, big-iron data management. In spite of all this large-scale stuff, I still think that Microsoft is the superior small-scale data management company. Did I miss a television commercial?

MySQL and OpenOffice.org face years of lagging behind the luxuries we enjoy with SQL Server, .NET and the Office System. However, I use MySQL almost every day using .NET assemblies to feed it data from SQL Server. Why? Because I run a Web site through a Web host that uses MySQL, Apache and Linux. Why do I use this Web host? Because Microsoft-equivalent tools have only recently started to match the convenience of MySQL, Apache and Linux (it's all about remote administration).

So my point is that I use proprietary and open source tools every day with one eye on the proprietary people trying to lock me into one less area of interoperability---in spite of using open standards (WordProeccingML comes to mind here).

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

Beer28 wrote:
Yeah, well, if you want to do your own kernel patches, and maintain the patches forever, then um.... linux is for you. So it's the best tool for the job...

You see, Beer, you've got your if-then conditional in there just like they did. (I'm only kidding.)

Instead of talking Linux vs. Windows, how about some thoughts on their ideas of embracing the benefits of the open source movement. I thought they made a good point that a major benefit of open source is the community it has around it. Maybe it's not as much about being able to see/use the source code as it is about having an active community of users and devs provide input and ingenuity during the development lifecycle.

there_is_no_spoon
no spoon

Hey Beer28, Bill Hilf here - thanks for all the comments.

Maybe I came off a little unclear, my point was not to infer that one is better than another, rather I was trying to explain some fundamental architectural differences between a Windows OS and a Linux OS - the separation of the X server, window manager and OS is one of the key examples of this difference. There are pros and cons with these implementations of a graphical system (as well as to other graphical systems such as MacOS, and many others historically). It's largely dependent on what works best for the problem you are trying to solve.

We think Windows provides a strong story here because there is a rich environment to develop against, with consistent and predictable support across a large amount of pcs and devices.

Keep your comments coming - also, check out the part II where we go into some further detail on the work in my lab. -Bill

erik_
Tablet Power

Yup, using your tablet DC during a interview looks negator

there_is_no_spoon
no spoon

As the saying goes - "You're soaking in it!"

Channel9 is a great example of this. You should also check out http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx

We are active in - and continue to develop - ideas around community.

Let me ask you: what are the key characteristics of a community development project that you find appealing? -Bill