It is now just about exactly a year since the
Halloween Documents were first released upon an unsuspecting world.
Many things have changed; Linux 2.2 has gone from promise to memory, the
Halloween Documents' author has quit Microsoft to go to work for a
Linux-based startup, mainstream market-research outfits like IDC now
predict a 30% server-market share for Linux in the near future, and the
first Linux IPO rocketed Red Hat Software to a six-billion-dollar market
capitalization. A few things have remained the same; Windows is still
buggy and insecure and crash-prone, Windows 2000 still isn't shipping,
and Microsoft is still making excuses.
But perhaps the most dramatic development in the Halloween saga has
been a change in the axis of Microsoft spin. Ed
"Sheriff of Nottingham" Muth has quietly
disappeared from public view, perhaps having publicly tickled his
tonsils with his toenails once too often for King Billy's tolerance.
Instead, Microsoft has been trying to sandbag Linux with supposedly
"objective" studies by third parties that turn out to have been bought
and paid for by the boys in Redmond.
Fortunately, these tactics have been pursued with the same slap-happy
level of incompetence that made Sheriff Ed's antics so amusing. The
Mindcraft
fiasco in March set a pattern continued by its sequels; Microsoft got
the benchmark results it wanted – only to be embarrassed when it came
out that Mindcraft had apparently run them on Microsoft-supplied
machines, at a Microsoft site, with the benevolent assistance of
Microsoft technicians tuning both Windows and (even more helpfully)
Linux – and then neglected to mention in its press release that
Microsoft had paid for and hosted the whole exercise. Mindcraft's
credibility was, of course, utterly destroyed.
Mindcraft was just small fry, though – one more tiny company who
learned too late that when Microsoft brings you flowers, they're likely
to end up decorating your grave one way or another. As the fatal
anniversary of Halloween I loomed,
Microsoft appears to have rerun the same scam on a much larger scale.
This time, its date for the dance was a respected name in IT
forecasting, the Gartner Group.
Cue the ominous background music ...
Sometime before 6 October, the Gartner Group published on its central
corporate website, www.gartner.com, a series of five reports slamming
Linux and predicting that its appeal would fade once the inevitable
Service Pack 1 for Windows 2000 came out. These reports quickly spawned
Linux-is-doomed articles like this
example from 15 Oct on the IDG Australia website, which promoted
them as objective studies by independent Gartner.
The articles, however, included the following small print at the end:
Microsoft Web Letter is published by Microsoft. Additional
editorial material supplied by Gartner Group, Inc. © 1999.
suggesting (though not proving) that this "Gartner report" was
actually written and published by Microsoft on Gartner's own website.
We can't tell you the exact date of the reports, because they aren't
there any more. On 19 October Gartner changed
the copyright on the reports to no longer mention Microsoft, while
publicly insisting that the research had not been funded by Microsoft.
Tellingly, however, the URLs of the reports still began with this
prefix:
http://www.gartner.com/webletter/microsoft/
and the same copyright notice, with the same attribution to
Microsoft, can still be found on articles in the
webletter/microsoft/ directory as this is written. Sometime
between 19 and 27 October yanked the reports off its site entirely.
Fortunately, Rick Moen, a well-known Linux activist, managed to
recover them from his Netscape cache – and found the copyright notice
reproduced above. In view of Gartner's protestations that Microsoft had
nothing to do with funding the research, the next lines in the notice
are especially interesting:
Editorial supplied by Microsoft is independent of GartnerGroup
analysis and in no way should this information be construed as a
GartnerGroup endorsement of Microsoft's products and services.
So. At first blush, these "Gartner Group" reports seem to have been a
warm personal gesture from Microsoft Corporation to itself. That theory
would fit both the copyright and the contents, which exactly repeats
Microsoft marketing cant that we've seen before – including such
trademarks of the genre as the (unsupported and, according to IDC,
false) assertion that Linux is taking seats mainly from other Unix
shops.
However, the Gartner Group insists that Microsoft did not write the
reports. A spokesman
explained through the same compliant IDG Australia reporter
responsible for the 15 Oct Linux-is-doomed story. Chase the link to get
a load of this spin-doctoring; no paraphrase by us could do justice to
the way Microsoft and the reporter deftly weave a fog of soothing
confusion around the contradictions in their story. We're supposed to
believe that:
- Gartner wrote the reports – even though the copyrights on them
explicitly said otherwise;
- A set of URLs on www.gartner.com are "the Microsoft site";
- Microsoft "sponsors" this "site", and paid unspecified fees to
Gartner Group related to the content – but nevertheless, in no way
did Microsoft fund the reports.
Rick's comment on their explanation is more eloquent than my own:
I'm sure [Gartner's denial] was truthful, if you squint at it the
right way: I'm certain that Microsoft Corporation's ongoing series
of cheques for sundry services and accommodations did not specify
(outright) that they were to fund a report that just by amazing
coincidence parrots Microsoft's exact party line about Linux, in
fine detail.
Quite. Far be it from us to suggest that the Gartner Group has
fraudulently colluded with Microsoft, however suggestive the evidence.
Could it all have been some horrible mistake? Could Gartner Group have
been innocently victimized by a Microsoft partisan in its own ranks?
Perhaps one of these scenarios is why the reports quietly disappeared –
but not before taking much of the Gartner Group's credibility with them,
alas. Poor Gartner Group; the folks at Mindcraft, I'm sure, would weep
for them – would deeply sympathize.
Ah well. Whatever occurred, I'm sure the large amounts of money that
Gartner admits to having received from Microsoft before and after this
incident have done much to soothe their upset at looking like patsies.
While the Gartner Group was busily issuing denials, Microsoft was
publishing yet another attack document, the
Linux Myths page. The Myths page has been well
debunked
elsewhere, but its technical weight is less relevant here than the fact
that it cited the Gartner Group reports as a supporting third-party
analysis. The references are still there, even though the reports are
gone. Perhaps this was the point of the exercise for whoever actually
wrote the reports?
And while all this was going on, a Linux-vs.-NT study that never had
a Microsoft copyright on it was being done by a firm that doesn't take a
retainer from Microsoft; Bloor Research. The results in their
19 October announcement are consistent with the results of many
other third-party studies such as John Kirch's
Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0
versus UNIX. They said "The verdict is clearly in favour of Linux."
(First published 31 Oct 1999. Some material in this
article was written by Rick Moen
and is used with his permission.)
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