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IT is quite obvious at this time that Microsoft Corp. has no plans of supporting Linux. Bill Gates himself said this two weeks ago during a roundtable discussion with Asian journalists.

Microsoft Philippines reiterates this, and tells Infotech why it thinks Windows will still be the platform of choice both here and abroad.

Myra Ayco-de Vera, marketing director of Microsoft Philippines, answers via e-mail questions thrown to her by Tessa R. Salazar.

(1) What does Microsoft Philippines say about Linux? There's an impression that with a "weakened" Microsoft brought about by the antitrust trial, Linux has been given an opportunity to gain ground. Will this be the case in the Philippines?

It is a fact that we live and work in a very competitive marketplace, where many operating systems and many different business models compete for customer, channel and ISV attention. Microsoft competes for business on its merits and we are confident that our strategy of inexpensive, approachable, comprehensive and integrated platform provides the best overall value for customers.

There are some scenarios such as simple Web serving wherein Linux is a direct competitor of Windows 2000. However, for other application scenarios such as transaction-oriented applications, data warehousing or running line-of-business applications, Linux is less competitive.

Microsoft continues to innovate our products based on what our customers require. We have not been affected at all by the Department of Justice case. As long as we give our customers what they want and what they need, as long as we help make their lives better through our products, then we are sure that our customers will support us.

(2) Are you feeling any threat right now from Linux in the Philippines? Linux advocates in the country are becoming increasingly aggressive nowadays. Linux 2000 in Cebu promises to be big. Is there a threat right now in the country?

The market has definitely become more dynamic and exciting with all these IT activities happening. We welcome competition and are very much ready for it. We think it is good for the industry. We, at Microsoft, have a lot of things planned for this year. Last February, we launched Windows 2000 and pretty soon, we will be launching the Windows DNA set of products on that platform. New products such as Windows 2000 DataCenter Server, Exchange 2000, SQL Server 2000, Commerce Server and Windows Millenium Edition are also going to be launched in a few months.

Microsoft has also been very active on technical skills transfer, and the interest and response of our audiences in our many events are continuously overwhelming. In fact, the market has been very good to us lately. Our revenues this fiscal year have exceeded our targets and the Philippine subsidiary is, I'm happy to say, still one of the fastest growing in Asia.

(3) How is Microsoft positioning itself vis-a-vis Linux and other open source operating system?

Microsoft products, particularly Windows 2000, provide the best support for new hardware, broadest support for applications and is still the easiest to use platform for users and system administrators. Our products have always been designed from the ground up with ease of use and GUI (graphical user interface) in mind.

Windows 2000 also has the added advantage of being able to support laptops, plug-and-play, USB, 1394 and many other devices and peripherals. Windows2000 supports over 2,000 printers compared to Red Hat which supports only 52 printers. Linux support for notebooks is very limited.

In terms of enterprise capabilities such as price-performance and total cost of ownership, Windows still has the advantage. It has the ability to support more workload at a lower cost than Unix or Linux systems. In fact, benchmarks from SPECWeb99 and TPC show how Windows 2000 provides better performance at lower cost.

(Dell has submitted to SPECWeb a benchmark of a Windows 2000 Server running on a single-processor system. This single-processor Windows 2000 system significantly outperforms a dual-processor, 600 MHz Pentium III system running Red Hat Linux 6.1 and the Zeus Web Server that was submitted in November 1999. In the datawarehousing arena, TPC-H benchmarks from the Transaction Processing Council show how a Windows 2000 eight-way system delivers comparable performance to a 12-way Unix system for about 1/3 the cost of Unix Sun Solaris system. Unfortunately there are no TPC-H benchmarks for Linux to do a direct comparison.)

(4) What factors could make Linux overtake Windows in the Philippines?

There are still many issues which Linux has to face. For one, most Linux users today are technically savvy and capable of modifying source code and recompiling the system in order to apply a fix. This group is not representative of the tens of millions of everyday users who want to get work done and are incapable or unwilling to use a product that requires such a technically proficient user. Companies without any in-house talent will have to pay for the services of those experts making the "free" Linux notion untrue.

Ease of use is therefore still a key factor for companies in choosing their operating system. The advances in setup and administration in Linux are with respect to Unix, which is well known for its cryptic and tedious management tasks. Even with these improved tools, an administrator must be familiar with command line tasks in general for the cases where the tools are not available. In contrast, Windows Server was built from the ground up with ease of use in mind. It is years ahead of Linux in the area of management, offering GUI based administration tools, wizards to simplify complicated tasks and scriptable administration for automated local and remote management.

Linux also does not offer much in terms of standardization and support. Since there are so many variants of Linux, applications and driver support for different peripherals is difficult to develop. Hardware support is limited to the set of devices that Linux users happen to use. Many other peripherals such as modems, sound cards, printers and scanners, are simply not supported or are in continuous "beta release."

The value of the Microsoft platform is that it is well-supported, functionally complete operating system on which secure, demanding computing can be hosted. Customer reference for a real enterprise-wide environment has not been seen from Linux. In terms of performance, PC week on June 25, 1999 reported the results of its own benchmark comparing Windows NT and Linux-it found Windows NT Server 4 to be 2.2 times faster than Linux as a file server and 2.3 times faster as a Web server. Note that Windows 2000 is even better than Windows NT in performance.

Another plus for Microsoft is the fact that every major system vendor in the world, save one, sells and supports Windows NT. Windows NT is also the reference development platform for the majority of the industry's applications. Windows 2000 has shipped well over one million copies worldwide and are expected to have 60,000 applications that run on the client and server. Additionally, more than 600 partners in the Philippines have been trained on Windows 2000 and thousands of developers have comprehensive Windows expertise.

(5) Will there come a time, even in its remotest possibility, that Microsoft Philippines will support Linux?

At this time, we really don't have plans to go that way. Linux does not yet have the broad customer demand, support structures or development community in place. We do not feel that it is mature enough to offer a release of applications like Office to effectively meet customer needs. However, Microsoft will continue to evaluate the marketplace and base its decisions on what customers want. We are a market-driven company, alert for new ways to serve our customers.

(6) Do you have any data or supporting local figures regarding Windows users versus Linux?

The distribution mechanism of Linux makes it a challenge to gather actual figures. It is downloadable from websites and there are many versions and end-user patches, so some "purchases" are analogous to Service Packs. The distribution mechanism does not differentiate between client and server configurations, so it is difficult to measure the client/server mix.