OK, Microsoft, nearly everyone’s favorite technology whipping boy, has been getting some bad press (too numerous to settle on any one or two), bad news (IBM to go Linux for desktops; OSS databases gaining) and the random bad lawsuit.

Microsoft is feeling the heat from Linux and other OSS, in particular. Not only are Asian countries uniting behind a Linux flavor, but MS has lost Austin, Texas and Israel as MS Office clients.

It seems that every day there is a story that trumpets a MS loss at the hands of either Linux or some other OSS product (noteably, OpenOffice).

You can tell that it’s hurting MS, because it commissioned a study that it is now saying that Windows is cheaper and faster than Linux. OK…

Well, let’s take a step back: The so-called facts (MS paid for study; it’s slanted in their favor, as well) in the study really aren’t that important. What’s important is that MS needed to make the study in the first place and then publish same to much fanfare.

This means Linux is and issue for MS.

Telling.

So, while MS stock is still up and doesn’t look poised to dive, it’s getting hit with some pretty heavy punches. And the company’s current ace in the hole – Longhorn, the latest “bet the company” product (an OS) is a ways off. Gartner just published a report that Information Week sums up as the following:

That’s not good news for MS. Two to four years? How many Internet Years is that? A zillion?

But we are talking about MS. Linux may hurt MS; OSS may actually pull MS off its monopoly pedestal.

But it won’t kill MS – and if MS did die, that would not be a good thing for tech overall.

Why?

Because MS still matters:

• MS makes great tools: It’s like I get paid for saying this. But it’s true – they do. Visual Studio, MS SQL Server (a user-friendly face to essentially a Sybase DB core), MS Office with its tight integration. Outlook – the scourge of many anti-Billies – is a killer app. Over the years, I’ve read many articles by tech folk who hate MS but admit that they won’t switch off Windows until they can get an Outlook clone. (With Apple and Ximian, this is now possible). Outlook is a tool. The standard others copy (without the security holes, agreed).
• MS has $$$ in the bank: Never underestimate deep pockets. It buried Netscape, eclipsed Apple’s Quicktime and RealNetworks audio/video (yep, one of the lawsuits), has done battle with Nintendo and Sony in the game box war, and has a reputation for buying what it cannot kill…and then killing it, if that suits the suits.
• MS has been amazingly wrong before and recovered: Remember the whole MS damn near missing the Internet fiasco? Bill Gates turned around a big-ass company in short time to address a company-demise threat. He or his henchmen could well do the same against the new nemesis: OSS.
• MS has a bunch of smart people: For every Ballmer jumping around like a Ritalin-deprived monkey, there are a hundred pretty much normal folks looking at stuff and making smart decisions. Yes, they are normal folks. Just smarter than normal, in different ways as needed for their job. For example, take Robert Scoble, the Longhorn evangelist. He’s promoting the hell out of Longhorn, and putting a good face on MS (putting a face/name on MS) with his Scobleizer Weblog. I don’t know if he’s a smart guy, a good programmer, a good businessman…but everyone reads him. Free publicity, and he freely dings MS and touts its strengths. Even if he is a schmuck, this is smart. Be it Gates/Ballmer/Scoble/someone else, somebody has made this happen and/or realized a good thing when it happened. Smart stuff.
• MS is starting to “get it”: Witness Robert Scoble, above. Embrace a tool that works and make it work to your advantage. While I personally believe Scoble believes what he writes and all that, it doesn’t matter: It’s a brilliant move, and generates lots of (overall) friendly buzz for MS.
• MS is everywhere and integrated: I guess this is two points (installed base and integration), but – to me – they are tightly…integrated. MS everywhere: Today, this is a given. Get over it. This leads to the integration issue: At the simplest level, would you install Word and Lotus 123 instead of Word and Excel? Uh, no. The integration is powerful; the bundling (even if illegal) is great. And if you are an all-MS shop, life (in some ways) is easier: Same help desks, same behavior in apps, knowledge that if you have MS backend and MS frontend all should be relatively OK…that’s the stuff that keeps CEO sleeping soundly every night. Damn the cost; just don’t give me any surprises! (Such as, “uh, the free OSS product we want to use doesn’t support [pick feature] in [pick application]”. With MS, the integration points are spelled out and there is little (OK – less) guessing.
• MSCE: Yeah, certification can be a good thing and all that, but … whatever. However, if you hire a MSCE, this droid will be able to do roughly 75% of the stuff you need on your all-MS system (front and back ends). Not the same for OSS. Sure, I can do a LAMP app. So, I need to know: Linux, Apache, mySQL (or Postgres) and PHP and/or Perl. These are FOUR different items. The MS solution – Windows Server vX.x, IIS, SQL Server, ASP – are all integrated. Same types of tools (learn one, can figger out the others) and tight hooks. Like it or not, the concept is compelling. One dude can handle this; folks who are mySQL savvy don’t necessarily grok Postgres, for example. Same type of tool (DB), but different in many ways. MS owns integration, for the most part. Again, CEOs can sleep.
• TCO: For those unclear, TCO = total cost of ownership. While Linux and other OSS tools are generally considered to have a low TCO – because they are either free or very low cost – there are the other intangibles (support needed, support available, admin skillsets etc). Depending on your politics, TCO for MS can be lower or higher than for OSS. Let’s leave that as that – the issue is that the damn bean counters want hard numbers, and MS has them. OSS doesn’t (because, for one reason, the OSS replacement for MS is a bunch of apps etc, not one company’s unified offerings). While OSS may well have a lower TCO, well…prove it: That’s what CEOs will say. They want the guarantee that what they sign off on is what the cost will be. Sure, MS is frickin’ expensive, but it’s understood what you’ll get, what’ll take to maintain it and so on. With OSS, you get low, low upfront costs…but…ah, the “but…” Who knows if you’ll need to use expensive middleware to connect with an old Exhange server, or hire an OSS admin on top of your NT admins and so on. That’s the crap the suits hate – the “surprise!” costs. They’d rather pay up the nose up front and be able to budget this. This is huge, and why OSS gets put aside by management types. It doesn’t work the way they want – and they are the ones paying for it, so…guess who often wins?
• Personnel: This is related to the preceding point. For companies looking to move to OSS from a MS environment, understand that it’ll not be a MS-today, MS-Free-tomorrow situation. There will either be a (potentially lengthy) migration period or an expected perpetual dual-environment situation. Usually, MS personnel (NT admins, say) are not qualified to handle the OSS needs. So, as part of the transition/melding, personnel have to be added or retrained. In either case, this is expensive. People are way more expensive than hardware/software. This is just a reality. If you save $XX on OSS but have to hire another body to help support it, well, you just spent way over $XX in all likelihood. This is part of the TCO equation many overlook. There is also the personnel friction factor – the NT types won’t like this new-fangled stuff (as OSS folks wouldn’t like being forced to coexist with/maintain MS ware.) You’re going to ostracize or lose some employees. Again, this is expensive. Bean counters hate this…