i went to a 'microsoft and open source 20/20 seminar'
yesterday, 7^th july.

it was held at the not unpleasant golf clubhouse at the celtic manor
resort hotel, newport.

after a lovely breakfast of coffee and lots of danish pastries, we were
treated to the following:

keynote speakers:

independent analyst, meta group, philip dawson, senior program director,
international infrastructure policies;

microsoft (m$) uk, nick barley, business marketing organisation;

microsoft uk, nick mcgrath, head of platform strategy;

customer perspective:

isv
partner, (name unknown), nationwide building society;

solutions
partner, tony kingston, deverill;

q & a session.

this was followed by a wonderful buffet lunch. i had smoked, marinated
salmon and thai fishcakes, chicken á la king with rice and
some fabulous chocolate mousse. unfortunately, there was no fresh
fruit apart from the strawberries on the mousse, so i had to have
extra helpings of mousse to increase my fruit intake.

after lunch, informal debates were held, with many of the audience
questioning the m$ representatives about the subject.

philip dawson

while billed as 'independent', mr dawson was, in fact, as partisan as it was
possible to be without having 'i love m$'
tattooed on his arse. every comment he made
praising open source (os) was immediately followed by a comment suggesting
that m$ did it better, even the area of web serving, where apache
is acknowledged as faster, more flexible and, critically, vastly
more secure, than m$' iis. he showed a slide purporting to show
which of many products was good for a particular job. in all areas
except web serving, m$ products were rated better than os products,
even iis was supposedly comparable to apache.

he showed his true colours at the q & a
where he sided entirely with the m$ squad in the face of some hostile
questioning by the audience.

nick barley

a short presentation of the benefits of windows xp service pack 2. i
have no idea why this was there, as it had nothing to do with os and little
to do even with a more general m$ sales pitch.

nick mcgrath

not a person you'd want to meet in a dark alley, mr mcgrath didn't
mention os at all, being concerned solely with selling windows server
2003 and windows xp professional.

nationwide building society

the nationwide's representative was their head
of it. i cannot remember his name. a very pleasant man, if somewhat
monotonous in speech, he only mentioned os in passing, with comments
on the lines of 'os was tested for this function but was found
lacking', offering no explanation of the selection process or
criteria and why os was lacking. excellent pitch for using m$
products for systems integration but adding nothing to the m$ v os
debate.

tony kingston

i have no idea why this man was there. he did not mention the term os
once, was concerned only with explaining why
deverill is such a wonderful company and why everyone should buy its
services. he barely even mentioned m$ products, having a brief list
of pros and cons of m$ - more pros than cons, of course, since m$
was paying for the gig - with no corresponding list of pros and
cons for os. again i ask myself why he was there, since i find it
difficult to believe that m$ were happy for him to simply make a huge
sales plug for his company.

q & a and informal debate

the q & a session was a strange mixture of what seemed to be plants
in the audience praising m$ and its products, so that the panel
could then puff themselves up even more, and a very hostile section
who were pro-os and very anti-m$ who asked difficult questions about
e.g. m$ being found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour
in both the us and the eu, their apparent fear of os, licensing
costs, lack of response to customer requests and destroying their
customers' markets.

the answers to the anti-competition accusations were glib in the extreme.
questioning nick barley during the informal debate, i made him a
little angry by suggesting that m$ were deliberately destroying the
market they're supposed to support by putting other software
companies out of business by e.g. writing their own browser, their
own media player, their own firewall and (i expect, soon) their own
anti-virus software.

other audience members tackled the speakers on
issues such as m$' withdrawal of support for e.g. windows nt4,
their licensing costs and that
organisations such as newham borough council can negotiate huge discounts
(57%) by threatening to change to os while the rest of the world has to subsidise those
discounts. m$' reply was that all companies have to withdraw support
for older products at some time, that they are 'aware' of concerns
about licensing costs and that large organisations have always been
able to negotiate price reductions on bulk purchases. so, nothing
new at all on that front.

when questioned in a hostile manner about why m$ are afraid of os, the
representatives were insistent that they are not afraid. when posed the question of
why, then, they have only just decided to start these
kind of seminars, the reply was that nick barley, as a 'new' member
of the m$ team, believed that 'reaching out' to the customer-base is essential for
all companies and that m$ are not afraid of os. i
note that it's taken him 2 years to come to that conclusion.

the dixons group representative
commented that dixons have rolled-out os software on m$
platforms at all its points of sale; using openoffice writer and calc.
the m$ representatives were blasé about losing that contract
despite acknowleding that 95% of their applications' users use
only 15% of those applications' features, making it easy and
cheap for users to replace expensive, bloated m$ office products with os
products.