Microsoft and Unisys are formulating a marketing plan to undermine the UNIX operating system. In an ad campaign to be announced today, the two companies will tout UNIX as an "expensive trap."

The companies plan to push two technologies in the ads: the Unisys ES7000 and Microsoft's Windows 2000 Datacenter server. The Unisys ES7000 is a 32 processor Cellular Multi-Processing (CMP)-based server capable of running multiple operating systems in each of four partitions and sharing other resources, such as PCI and memory across all of the partitions (see our previous news article). Datacenter server can be used at the heart of this system to take advantage of the many processors.

The Microsoft and Unisys ads state:

We have the way out. No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."
The ads also take shots at Sun, picturing a person painting himself into a corner with the color of Sun's servers.

Read more at ZDNet.



ROMAN'S OPINION
The reason that Microsoft and Unisys are creating these ads is the fact that they are not beating UNIX in the high end, mainframe-type systems. They are still trying to get a good piece of this market. Datacenter server and the ES7000 have been out for some time now, but consumer acquisition has still been sparse.

Microsoft has got to be one of the few companies that can take stabs at a company or a company's product and not expect it to drop any partnerships. Microsoft is taking stabs at UNIX, yet IBM and HP, two companies that develop UNIX systems, will no doubt still continue to do business with Microsoft in the PC sector because of Microsoft's overwhelming marketshare in the OSes of that arena.

This is just another area that Microsoft and Unisys want to increase their marketshare. Often, taking stabs at the competition in advertising is acceptable business practice. In this case I am not sure the tactics surprise anyone.


--------------------------------------------------------

I got this from Geek's front page. Just pathetic ain't it...

Now,...tell me if I'm smoking pot here,...or is this what you get for the server string too while scanning: http://www.wehavethewayout.com/

Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on FreeBSD

...Oh the irony!