Microsoft lacks confidence in own products Dog food is sold to the owners who buy it, not to the dogs who have to eat it. "Eating your own dog food" is a metaphor for a programmer who uses the system he or she is working on. Is it yet functional enough for real work? Would you trust it not to crash and lose your data? Does it have rough edges that scour your hand every time you use a particular feature? Would you use it yourself by choice?
When Microsoft acquired the successful Hotmail free Email service, the system had roughly 10 million users, and the core systems that powered Hotmail all ran Unix. A few years later the number of Hotmail users exceeds 100 million, but in spite of Microsoft's claims about the power of Windows and their previous intentions to replace Hotmail's core systems with Windows servers, Hotmail's core systems still run Unix. This is discussed thoroughly in a leaked-out internal paper<http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html>by Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server Product Group member David Brooks. He mentions the proverbial stability of the Unix kernel and the Apache web server, the system's transparency and combination of power and simplicity. Windows on the other hand is considered to be needlessly GUI-biased (Brooks writes: "Windows 2000 server products continue to be designed with the desktop in mind") and also complex, obscure and needlessly resource-hungry. (Brooks: "It's true that Windows requires a more powerful computer than Linux or FreeBSD [and treats] reboot as an expectation".) Hotmail is not the only example of Microsoft's refusal to eat their own dog food. The "We have the way out" anti-Unix website that Microsoft (along with partner Unisys) put up in the first months of 2002, initially ran Unix and Apache. (It was ported to IIS on Windows 2000 only after the entire ICT community had had a good laugh). For years Microsoft's own email servers have been protected by third-party security software, which amounts to a recognition of the fact that Exchange on Windows needs such third party assistance to provide even a basic level of system security. Microsoft's SQL Labs, the part of the company that works on Microsoft's SQL Server, purchaced NetScreen's 500-series security appliance to defend its network against Code Red, Nimda and other worm attacks. Apparently the labs' choice was made despite the fact that Microsoft then already sold its own security product touted as a defense against such worms. The Microsoft ISA [Internet Security and Acceleration] Server was introduced in early 2001 and was hailed by Microsoft as their first product aimed entirely at the security market. In fact, the most important reason businesses ought to switch to ISA Server, according to Microsoft, was that "ISA Server is an [...] enterprise firewall and secure application gateway designed to protect the enterprise network from hacker intrusion and malicious worms". Still Microsoft's SQL Labs prudently decided to rely on other products than their own to provide basic security. And Microsoft's own accounting division used IBM's AS/400 midrange platform for critical applications such as the payroll system, until well in the late nineties. Food for thought. On 5/16/07, Prasanna Gautam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > how many ppl here think that MS uses windows for hotmail server..... ? if > u raise ur hand, all I have to say is, "haa haaa... " > here's a leaked document from MS that discusses this... yep they still use > Unix... > http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html > and most of the security is actually done on unix servers... :D > MS even hosted it's anti-unix site on unix server and apache before > switching it to Windows 2000 and IIS.. > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ FOSS Nepal mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal Community website: http://www.fossnepal.org/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
