How is Microsoft positioning itself vis-a-vis Linux and other open source operating system?
Microsoft products, particularly Windows 2000, provide the best support for new hardware, broadest support for applications and is still the easiest to use platform for users and system administrators. Our products have always been designed from the ground up with ease of use and GUI (graphical user interface) in mind. Windows 2000 also has the added advantage of being able to support laptops, plug-and-play, USB, 1394 and many other devices and peripherals. Windows2000 supports over 2,000 printers compared to Red Hat which supports only 52 printers. Linux support for notebooks is very limited. In terms of enterprise capabilities such as price-performance and total cost of ownership, Windows still has the advantage. It has the ability to support more workload at a lower cost than Unix or Linux systems. In fact, benchmarks from SPECWeb99 and TPC show how Windows 2000 provides better performance at lower cost. (Dell has submitted to SPECWeb a benchmark of a Windows 2000 Server running on
