Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
A new round of benchmark tests pits free-software hackers against the gang from Redmond in a race for operating-system supremacy.
Jun 16, 1999 | John Taschek, the director of PCWeek magazine's state-of-the-art computer testing facility in Foster City, Calif., is an affable man. On the morning of June 14, he took evident enjoyment in leading a group of visitors through his lab, pointing out the racks of hundreds upon hundreds of Pentium 233 computers and myriad cables snaking across the ceiling. At one point, he surveyed the group, which included three Microsoft employees, three Linux programmers, two journalists and Bruce Weiner, president of the Mindcraft performance testing lab, and quipped that "this was the first time these people had ever been in the same room together -- and will probably also be the last."
The assembled visitors dutifully laughed at Taschek's oblique reference to the growing rivalry between Microsoft and the small companies pushing Linux as an alternative to Windows, but the frost in the air didn't dissipate one bit. Grouchiness was the order of the day. Excluding the journalists, no one really appeared to be enjoying themselves. The tour itself was a distraction from the main event: the commencement of a week of intensive comparison testing between the Windows NT and Linux-based operating systems.
The representatives of the Linux community -- two engineers from Red Hat, the leading vendor of packaged Linux distributions, and one from Penguin Computing, a fast-growing seller of computer systems running Linux -- made no attempt to sugar-coat their feeling that the tests were unfair and irrelevant, that the particular configuration of hardware chosen favored Microsoft. For their part, the delegates from Redmond, led by Jim Ewel, a veteran Microsoft marketing specialist recently fingered by the Wall Street Journal as the leader of a newly formed "Linux attack team," responded to the obvious disdain broadcast by the Linux coders with their own imperturable brand of self-confidence. If the Linux punks wanted to make good on their claims to be aiming at the big-time "enterprise" market, then they had to learn how to play with the big boys.
Even Bruce Weiner looked uncomfortable, although he appeared confident that the PCWeek tests will ultimately ratify the controversial results his company trumpeted in a study released last April. That report declared NT to be far superior to Linux -- and incited a storm of outrage from Linux fans, who were incensed when they learned that the test had been commissioned by Microsoft and was conducted in a Microsoft performance testing laboratory with the help of Microsoft employees.
Uncomfortable, strained, replete with icy glares -- this was not your typical industry get-together, with its hypocritical politeness and warmed-over marketing hype. Instead, it was an initial skirmish between determined opponents from opposite ends of the computing-culture spectrum, circling each other like growling dogs trying to decide whether to fight.
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