What could Microsoft learn from Linux? Jason Perlow takes a look at Windows Server 2008, and says that Microsoft should consider taking a page from its competition, the Linux distro vendors, and consider shortening the product release cycle to allow for more incremental, short term upgrades.
By the time this column sees the light of day, Windows Server 2008 will be RTM’ed — Released to Manufacturing. Oh joy.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I am one of the few Linux die-hards that actually LIKES Windows. I’m sorry, I can’t help myself, it’s a disease. I’ve said it before, Windows is in my blood — I spent a lot of my early career doing Windows support and systems engineering at Fortune 500 companies, and I still use Windows as my primary productivity platform. I also feel that Windows Server is a perfectly good commodity computing operating system, if best practices for patching and keeping the systems maintained are applied.
Still, I don’t see a lot of big companies chomping at the bit to go upgrading to Windows Server 2008. Certainly, there are several things to like about the new release, such as improved security and disk encryption inherited from Windows Vista, a streamlined management interface, enhancements to clustering, built-in virtualization, integrated IIS 7.0, componentized installation, an optional” headless” operation mode and role-based configuration.
However, with the notable exception of the aforementioned Hyper-V virtualization (which, by the way, will eventually be available as a de-bundled separate product for the low price of about $28 and will be compatible with Xen-enabled Linux VM’s — very cool, although neither VMWare nor Citrix should be shuddering yet) all of these things are very incremental enhancements, and do not result in very compelling reasons for a quick mass adoption or migration…
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