Guild Companies

Windows & Linux Edition
Volume 2, Number 4 -- January 29, 2003

But Wait, There's More . . .

Microsoft, only three months away from shipping the "Whistler" version of Windows as Windows Server 2003, has extended the life of Windows NT 4.0, which is two generations back from Whistler on the Microsoft server product chain. Support for Windows NT 4.0 was set to expire on December 31, 2002, for non-security hotfixes, but has reportedly been extended until the end of 2003. Support for security-related hotfixes was set to expire at the end of 2003, and now reportedly has been pushed out to the end of 2004. While Windows NT accounts for only about 15 percent of the installed base of Windows server environments, whoever is using it must be important and using it pervasively for Microsoft to have offered this extension. Microsoft was unavailable for comment at press time, but we are chasing it down for next week. Our guess is that the company is worried about the security implications of having millions of NT servers out there in the world with known security bugs and the blowback it would face if it knowingly left these users exposed, even if they are two generations behind.

John Connors, Microsoft's chief financial officer, held an analyst briefing last Friday, where he went over the company's fiscal second-quarter financial results for the second time. (Think of it like a review session before mid-terms.) In the briefing, Connors said something interesting: that Microsoft's top brass had given the go-ahead to hire another 1,500 direct sales representatives to push Microsoft products into enterprise accounts. He said that depending on the region, the direct sales head count for Microsoft's sales team is up by 45 to 65 percent, which should put the overall headcount for the Microsoft direct enterprise sales team at between about 4,500 and 5,000. Microsoft is one of the few companies that is taking on new employees, and said last year that it would boost worldwide headcount to around 55,000 by June 2003, the end of its fiscal year. Microsoft clearly needs more foot soldiers in the push for its Licensing 6.0 pricing schemes and in the war against Linux, and that is what those 1,500 new people are all about.
Microsoft, which is in the midst of trying to help its SQL Server customers fight the Slammer worm, said this week that it has spent close to $200 million making the forthcoming "Whistler" Windows Server 2003 operating system more secure. This money covered retraining of some 11,000 software engineers, as part of Bill Gates' Trustworthy Computing initiative, to be on the lookout for potential security problems, and educating them on how to code without creating security risks. Microsoft's security message was drowned out by the Slammer worm, which has been able to propagate (even on Microsoft's own Web sites) because companies did not apply the appropriate security patches to close a well-known hole in SQL Server. Slammer hit the Internet one day after Microsoft was touting the improved security features in Windows Server 2003. It's hard to say whether this was good or bad timing. To find out more on the Slammer worm, check out Microsoft's official statement about it.
After much pressure from potential and existing customers, not to mention the analyst community and some of its own employees, Unisys has bowed to popular demand and will begin supporting the Linux operating system on its high-end ES7000 servers, which offer 16- or 32-way SMP scalability and are the most powerful Wintel boxes on the market. Unisys has always supported SCO Group's UnixWare within partitions on the ES7000s, but two years ago it boldly hitched its wagon to Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, which did not take off in the market as well as many had expected. Momentum is building, however, for enterprise-class Windows, and that is why Unisys has quietly solicited SCO to port and support its Linux 4.0 (which is the former Linux distribution from Caldera International, which SCO bought last year) to the ES7000s. Linux 4.0 is based on the UnitedLinux kernel. Unisys has a very tight relationship with Microsoft, and this development cannot please the company. But SCO could have supported Linux 4.0 on the ES7000s without Unisys' help, and Unisys has distanced itself from SCO by not even pre-installing the software on its servers. SCO engineers have to do the job, and tech support for the Linux partitions will come from SCO, even if customers call Unisys.
SCO Group owns the patents and intellectual property of the Unix operating system, which it bought from Novell (which bought it from AT&T, the creator of Unix System V). AT&T and Novell were never that aggressive about protecting this technology portfolio. SCO, which has suffered through years of hard times in the Unix market and had to buy Linux distributor Caldera International to remain relevant in the Intel server market, has hired David Boies, the U.S. government's lead lawyer in the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit, and has established a separate division called SCOsource to police the Unix patents, copyrights, and technologies. The company will offer SCO System V for Linux to users who want to run Unix applications on Linux. We suspect that SCO and Boies will be talking to all of the Unix and Linux players about how they owe licensing money to SCO by virtue of Unix IP that has made its way into Linux and related systems programs. SCO System V for Linux is available for $149 per processor, with volume discounts. Future updates to Linux 4.0 from SCO will include these Unix libraries. It will be interesting to see if the major Unix and Linux vendors pay SCO for the Unix IP willingly, or after threats or actual lawsuits. SCO's hiring of Boies, who is not an intellectual property lawyer, is not even a veiled threat; it's a real one.