Actually, his official job title is general manager of platform strategy, but Martin Taylor is better known as Microsoft's chief Linux strategist, and has been holding that position for one year. Time to celebrate, and time to look back at what he has learned about the changing Linux-Unix-Windows market so far. He has also a lot to say about where he sees Linux (and particularly Novell, Red Hat, and IBM) going and how
Microsoft plans to compete with the open-source operating system, e.g. by commissioning "Get the Facts" analyst reports that compare Windows to Linux. The complete interview is at http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2004/0,4814,95988,00.html
Another interesting must-read article covers the "Mission Critical Microsoft" initiative, also devised to battle Linux. Read the eWeek article to find out more.
The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has found the Microsoft ads in which it claims that the cost of running Linux for file and Web serving is ten times as high as running the same workload on Windows 2003 servers, misleading.
Actually, Microsoft compared the cost of running Linux on a single IBM zSeries mainframe engine to the cost of running Windows 20003 on a two-way X86 server using 900 MHz Xeon. And a zSeries mainframe is an enormously expensive platform to run Linux on. Microsoft won't tell you what the comparison would have been on equal platforms (can you guess why not ?), but you can read that in analyst reports by Robert Frances Group and D.H. Brown.
Read more at The Linux Beacon.