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Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 27: Afterglow of the robotic inferno
By Thomas Scoville
[06/16/99]

Three lives in Everquest
When a game is this beautiful and complex, who cares about a few deaths along the way?
By Janelle Brown
[06/15/99]

The Web's plagiarism police
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By Andy Dehnart
[06/14/99]

Silicon Follies
Chapter 26
The sysadmin vs. the world
By Thomas Scoville
[06/12/99]

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The great Web "brain drain"
Is the Net sucking up corporate America's best and brightest -- or just its greediest?
By Scott Rosenberg
[06/11/99]

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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.

Next page | Mindcraft to Penguin: "You are challenging my integrity"