March 28, 2002 12:35 PM PST
Unisys, Microsoft to launch anti-Unix ads
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Unisys is spending $25 million on the campaign, spokeswoman Pasha Ray said. Microsoft is adding funding of its own but declined to say how much.
The 18-month project will include advertisements, technical sales efforts and other marketing work plugging Unisys' high-end server and Microsoft's top-end version of Windows--two products that so far have made only their first steps into the data centers where high-end servers often reside.
The campaign, called "We have the way out," describes Unix as an expensive trap. "No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever," one ad reads.
The same ad depicts a scene in which a computer user has painted himself into a corner with purple paint. Sun's servers are manufactured in a shade of purple similar to that in the ad.
Sun responded to the campaign in a statement. "Sun still does not see Microsoft as a real threat in the datacenter market where reliability, availability, serviceability and security are key," the company said. "As for Unix being 'inflexible,' 'expensive,' and 'complex,' we feel those are terms much better suited to the closed and proprietary world of Windows."
Two technologies are at the center of the campaign. The Unisys ES7000 server can accommodate as many as 32 Intel processors and can be divided into independent "partitions," each with its own operating system. The Datacenter version of Windows 2000 can run on machines with as many as 32 processors. These top-end configurations are rare, Unisys has said, with eight-, 12-, or 16-processor partitions more common.
Unisys faces competition not only from Unix servers, which have accommodated dozens of processors for years, but also from IBM's new Summit servers, which top out at 16 processors but cost considerably less than the ES7000.
Another obstacle for Unisys: Only a few hundred ES7000 servers have been sold so far, and sales partnerships with Dell, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have all fallen apart.
You can pull a copy of Linux & install it on everything ranging from embedded systems, archaic 286's with 12Megs ram, pitiful 386's with 16Megs ram, 486's with a "whopping" 32Megs ram, all the way up to the latest, bleeding-edge AMD Athlon 64bit screaming monster with 4Gig ram.
You can't install Windows XP on anything slower than a Pentium 500MHz with 64Megs (and that will run so abysmally slow, you might as well attempt to grow new limbs in the wait)...
"It requires you to pay for expensive experts."
(Laughing merrily) It cost me less to get my Unix Admin certification *for three years in a row* than it did to get *A* year of MCSE Win2000Pro certification, and I've been using every version of Windows since 3.0.
"It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."
(Wiping the tears of mirth from my eyes)
Now THIS is rich, and utterly, totally, pure FUD. A free operating system, installed on a *thrown away as obsolete* computer system, complete with a full Apache server environment, has required all of thirty minutes of my time, and most of THAT was waiting for the program to download. I read the manual while I waited, set the few variables I needed, locked down all the ones I didn't (as the instructions said I should), and had a working server in under an hour.
It's BEEN up and running for almost a year now, and the ONLY time I've had to deal with it is to tweak with my front-end client-interface-web-page *because I didn't like the way it rendered in Internet Explorer versus everything else*.
EVERY time I've set up a purely MS server environment, it takes an hour to install, another to patch, another to configure, and DAYS of troubleshooting the stinking thing to determine why it refuses to work the way it's supposed to.
Microsoft needs to just stop. They make themselves look even MORE incompetant than usual when they open their mouths and spew garbage disguised as fact.
You can pull a copy of Linux & install it on everything ranging from embedded systems, archaic 286's with 12Megs ram, pitiful 386's with 16Megs ram, 486's with a "whopping" 32Megs ram, all the way up to the latest, bleeding-edge AMD Athlon 64bit screaming monster with 4Gig ram.
You can't install Windows XP on anything slower than a Pentium 500MHz with 64Megs (and that will run so abysmally slow, you might as well attempt to grow new limbs in the wait)...
"It requires you to pay for expensive experts."
(Laughing merrily) It cost me less to get my Unix Admin certification *for three years in a row* than it did to get *A* year of MCSE Win2000Pro certification, and I've been using every version of Windows since 3.0.
"It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."
(Wiping the tears of mirth from my eyes)
Now THIS is rich, and utterly, totally, pure FUD. A free operating system, installed on a *thrown away as obsolete* computer system, complete with a full Apache server environment, has required all of thirty minutes of my time, and most of THAT was waiting for the program to download. I read the manual while I waited, set the few variables I needed, locked down all the ones I didn't (as the instructions said I should), and had a working server in under an hour.
It's BEEN up and running for almost a year now, and the ONLY time I've had to deal with it is to tweak with my front-end client-interface-web-page *because I didn't like the way it rendered in Internet Explorer versus everything else*.
EVERY time I've set up a purely MS server environment, it takes an hour to install, another to patch, another to configure, and DAYS of troubleshooting the stinking thing to determine why it refuses to work the way it's supposed to.
Microsoft needs to just stop. They make themselves look even MORE incompetant than usual when they open their mouths and spew garbage disguised as fact.