Blog: Pete Loshin

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Microsoft on Winning Against Linux, The Smart Way!

All big companies generate tons of marketing material to help sell their product. Just come to light--and then, just as quickly back in the box--is a website from Microsoft, Winning Against Linux the Smart Way. It was intended to be a resource for "channel partner summit", and now all you can see there is a teensy little message that says "This material is being updated and will be made available to Microsoft partners shortly."

Good thing I took a good look at it before it got locked up. According to the material I saw, there are five "Linux personas": distinct "types" of people (in the enterprise, presumably) who are using Linux:

• Linux Experimenter, "largely Microsoft(r) shops experimenting with Linux", accounting for 24% of all Linux users
• Market Follower, "waiting for broader industry support for Linux before expanding deployment", 9% of Linux users
• Application Driven, "focused on business requirements and place application needs ahead of platform decisions", 27% of Linux users
• Linux Afficianado, "deploying Linux aggressively and believe it to be superior technology", 18% of Linux users, and by far the least attractive, as evidenced by Microsoft's use of a photo of a scrawny, balding, bespectacled and soul-patched Linux nerd.
• UNIX Transitioner, "primarily interested in transitioning legacy UNIX applications", 22% of Linux users.

There's a lot more, much of it pretty predictable, about what kinds of questions to ask prospects, how to identify the different personas, and how to deal with those different personas.

My first question, was: "Is this really a Microsoft thing and not an elaborate hoax?" I think we got the answer to that from Sublime Media, the outfit who are hosting that message at the original link cited above.

Too bad the site went dark so quickly, since it shed some interesting light on Microsoft's Linux strategies. I sure do hope it'll come back sometime, soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

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