Windows more reliable than RedHat Linux? Yes, says Yankee Group

Why are they always comparing Windows to RedHat? Why the hell did they pick, out of all the *nix distros…RedHat?

Lets see the same tests with THESE configurations:

Windows Server 2003 vs OpenBSD 3.9
Windows Server 2003 vs Gentoo 2600.0
Windows Server 2003 vs Slackware 10.2
Windows Server 2003 vs FreeBSD 6.1

Comeon Yankee Group, or are you too scared because you know that if you tested Windows against a better *nix system, that Windows would lose. Thought so.

Adding clutter (yes, I don’t quite like the vista look) to the Windows 2003 code might affect/reduce the reliability.

btw, windows 2003 is sure a lot stable.

I’m sorry, did a marketing drone sit at your computer screen again? You should really lock your workspace when you leave it.

God knows what idiots might type when you’re away, like ANOTHER bogus ‘MS is so great, linux totally sucks’ report.

Have you ever tried a modern linux distro?

@ #19. I was going to post exactly the same thing about the 20%. 20% less down time (in hours) doesn’t mean 20% more uptime.

It seems she concludes how well managed a system is makes more difference to up time than choice of OS. What next ? A report saying rain is wet ? HP-UX and Solaris are more reliable. Well with a fixed set of hardware support (a luxury neither Linux nor Microsoft enjoy), support contracts as the norm (ditto), and a much narrower range of applications, you’d expect that. If you compare Solaris boxes which run only Oracle, with a support contact, and dedicated IT staff, with a mixture of all Linux or all Windows environments what result would you expect ?

It seems the people who have to find something intereting about the report in order to get customers for Yankee strugled – hence the “Windows better than Linux” line – which the trolls find so hard to accept. (e.g. #30), the report isn’t “MS is so great Linux totally suck” – it is “Linux and Windows are about as reliable as each other, but Linux takes a little longer to fix”. A total non story “OS reliablity: everything much the same” doesn’t get much attention.

I was getting effectively 100% uptime from Novell Netware 2.0a back in 1989 (power supply to our building could only manange about 99.7%) – how did I manage it on software which wasn’t all that good ? The installation meant you couldn’t stray far from best practice, and once installed you left well alone. If that were true of todays systems (Linux or Windows) – we’d have better up time.

From http://www.iaps.com/2006-Server-Reliability-Survey.html:

“Custom SuSE Linux delivers the highest reliability and fewest minutes — about 430 minutes of outage per server, per year.”

Does it state what version of RedHat they compared Windows Sever 2003 with?

I don’t find any RedHat based linux distro (the kind that can use .rpm’s) very reliable unless you compile everythign yourself.

Debian is one of the most rock solid distros out there. Most hosting companies use Debian because of this.

I don’t understand WHY people use RedHat for a server, to me it just doesn’t make sense. I can uderstand if they are new to linux or are going to be using RedHat for a desktop.

Who said Windows doesn’t have stability issues? I just had Windows XP crash twice this week, once at home and once at work. Not doing unusual things: losing my wireless network and trying to close IE after sleeping bonked my home laptop, and my office machine has had issues with task manager.

Now, it’s still 1,000,000% better than Windows 98. I hardly ever ctl-alt-del anymore. I don’t think XP is better than 2000. If ctl-alt-del only appeared as quickly as it did in Windows 95, it would be perfect. Because now when something goes wrong, it really goes wrong, and I need a hardware reboot.

Now, I don’t mean to be critical to MS. XP sp2 is a great product. Windows usually runs great on older hardware (up until Vista, they did better at this than anyone). They are too conservative in a number of areas, but I can still play Starcraft on XP and my company still runs Dos software (thankfully, I personally don’t, I log in to Linux). But the difference between Vista and Server 2003 has to be lightyears, or your marketing dep’t has some explaining to do.

How odd that the X360 isn’t truly backwards compatible?

Well, if Laura DiDiot of Yankme Group said it, it HAS to be true, right?

Like others have commented, you need to find an analyst with some credibility if you don’t want to be laughed at for repeating this stuff.

Go ahead and submit it to slashdot! They’ll love it!

It’s already been submitted to slashdot:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/07/1438224

What a bullshit ‘study’.

So if Windows had 20% more uptime than Linux annually, then that means the Linux system was down for *60 days straight*? Was an MCSE operating the Linux system or something?

Scoble–who are you kidding with the “not sponsored by Microsoft” line? The Yankee Group and the Laura DiDio (people conducted the study) have a history of writing shill articles for Microsoft.

Here’s an article written a year ago about the same people who conducted this study:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/04/the_truth_about_1.html

This is why marketing drones shouldn’t rush into heavy machine gun fire, (and should consult archives and do actual research) as so so so many problems with that study, including comparison and task similarity issues, analyst independence, tilted methodology (using only those that choose to deploy), weighted advertising, with a lack of raw data, third-party stooge as “cop-outtting”, Laura DiDio already a gadfly (see the SCO case) and etc. etc.

But Scoble blindly walks in posting whatever moves…armed with not even a pea-shooter, nor a single-cell of brain-power, unaware of the history about it all.

#38 — exactly my point at #19

How can they get away with such blindly incorrect stats. They should retract and publish the stats the mathematicians say are accurate!

wow, christopher coulter is a real b***h. If you hate scoble that much, why do you even read this blog (as well as comment on it). I often disagree with alot of what Scoble says, but I know that he is infact genuine and its very rude to call him a mere “marketing drone” etc…

I suppose this is off topic, so feel free to delete it.

Oh that’s too funny that SuSE turned out to be the most reliable. As in a funny on Microsoft and Red Hat way.

If Windows is so reliable I’m surprised you continue to host your blog on Linux. And you allow your son to use an iBook and you own an iPod. A Playstation 3 can’t be far behind.

I didn’t choose WordPress because of its reliability. All of our Microsoft blogs are running on Windows and they are up just as often as my blog is and they have a lot more readers, too.

As to iBook or iPod or Playstation, what does that have to do with the reliability of Windows? Well, the iBook might, but Patrick has a Windows machine too and now he wants an Intel machine so he can run Windows on that (Windows has a lot more games than his Mac does).

Playstation 3? Nah. We already have an Xbox 360. Don’t see what I’d get by spending another $600.

“he wants an Intel machine so he can run Windows on that.”

A Macbook Pro then?

i’m using windows 2003 on my notebook … never had a system crash (no bsod no hangs etc…) since i installed it… i’m a software developer and an aggressive software installer/tester

i don’t know if it’s better that redhat but windows 2003 it’s surely stable (and a lot better than xp)

windows SUCKS…

I would have to agree with you there, windoze is just plain unreliable. Nothing can bring down Ubuntu server, I have had it run for years without a single minute of downtime apart from a power outage. I think people should take linux more seriously because, Microsoft’s prices are rising and are already too high.