First off let's dissect the FUD coming from this MS talking head.
"The Linux phenomenon created this emotional hype or spike where, in some ways, people became less concerned about some of these practical issues around cost of ownership, reliability, security and so on,"
Incredible. One of the most insecure operating systems on the planet in active use is Microsoft Windows. Given the huge associated costs with Windows (viruses, spyware, and brittle development) how does anyone with a straight face claim to be the more reliable platform. The simple fact of the matter running Windows in a lab where it cannot be attacked doesn't measure the entire cost of ownership of Windows. Viruses and spyware alone make Windows not worth it.
"They're also realizing they can't migrate and evolve (open-source technology) as much as they had thought. For example, U.S. company Flyi.com handles about 90 percent of travel reservations through their online portal, which they run on Linux and Apache.
The systems were running fine until the company had a huge spike in traffic, and there were all kinds of downtime issues. So they did the upgrades, added a few servers, some hardware, some memory and new technologies around the Web site to do more customer relationship database tracking. It was all very complex, and some of the seams of the Linux architecture were beginning to show. "
Poor design decisions can happen on any platform. Not properly architected a large scale web site and the seams will show in any architecture. I did a little digging on his noted example company Flyi.com Independence Air is now a small low cost airline. The Google Page Rank of their home page is a 7 which while respectatable, is not earth shattering. Their customer story from MS is located here. In that study it's apparent that Independence Air was sold a bill of goods in development of their new system based on Linux. Their first step was to buy a BEA Application server for $75,000. They then hired 5 consultants at 150/hour for six months to customize what should have been a relatively simply project. In this particular case the real weakness of the project wasn't Linux but the Bea Application Server which caused costs to spiral out of control. That combined with grossly incompetent consultants really created the problem. Starting off with a $75,000 closed source application server is not the way to begin a project. I find it interesting that in the customer testimonial, the CIO blamed the consultants instead of his own poor decision making in the process deploying the system.
One quote I find interesting,
"Most IT professionals don't want to be in the business of maintaining system-level software,"
That's true. However businesses that are being built on the LAMP stack use their control of the system at the system level as an economic advantage. Take a look at Google. System level control of the operating system enables them to scale search in a way that has never been done before. This gives them a platform from which to launch new web products that can quickly scale up without the time-consuming
Here's the true telling quote.
"From a competitive standpoint, take Linux, for example. There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do. There's no new feature or new design that can be done only on Linux, and not on Microsoft."
The problem is that statement can be turned around. "There's nothing really innovative today that Microsoft does that Linux cannot do." Therein lies the rub for Microsoft. Since the LAMP stack commoditizes large chunks of the software stack, it enables a small set of developers launch projects with relatively little work on the basic stack elements.
