ZDNET has a story about Amazon.Com’s use of Linux which the companys says saves it a lot of money. If you read the fine print, though, the main reason it saves them money is because the OS is free in dollar terms — they claim it costs them about as much to administer as Windows or Unix, but the low cost of the OS and the fact it will run on low-end beige boxes produces a large cost saving.
Rather than point that out, however, Microsoft’s Doug Miller steps in it big time, saying that when companies deploy Linux they,
end up being in the operating systems business, managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don’t conflict with each other. That’s the job of a software vendor like Microsoft.
Has Miller ever actually used any of Microsoft’s products in a real world environment? The nightmare of having to deal with a litany of software and security patches alogn with conflicts between software packages is practically a textbook definition of Windows.