[Sussex] Steve Ballmer using Linux in public

[Steve Dobson]

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 14:40 +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:
<snip>
> Microsoft's marketing material seems to focus a lot on TCO - this
> leads me to believe that they think they are in a price war with Linux
> vendors.  This effectively cuts off (for the short term) the prospect
> of charging existing customers more.  OK, they're can look to emerging
> markets for organic growth in "seats", but they're loosing badly in
> those markets right now.

It would appear that Microsoft is wrong to fight on the TCO front.
While it is no doubt important to some, in a recient survay
(see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050426092929216 for a
report) being able to modify the application featured higher than 
expected.  It was not even concirdered an important reason for
going down the F/OSS path so was not one of the tick boxes on the 
study - those filling in the form had to write it in themselves!

Steve