Bill Hilf

The director of platform strategy at Microsoft, Bill Hilf has lead the Linux and open source software technology group at Redmond for the past two years and formerly headed the global Linux technical strategy of IBM.  He says reliability and predicability are the key factors which give Microsoft’s software the edge over Linux and open source alternatives.

Hilf says: “When I talk to a middle of the road customer that might be indifferent about Microsoft or Linux, one of the words they typically use with me is predictability. How do I know that the software is extraordinarily well tested and predictable?

“Some of the key differentiators are when I think about how we build software, a tremendous amount of investment and energy goes into testing to ensure the predictability of the software experience. So when you look at our products, some people say, ‘it takes forever to build a product at Microsoft, blah, blah, blah.’ It takes a long time to design a product and code it. It takes a really long time to test it where it’s going to be deployed across half a billion users – that’s a lot of work.

“There’s a lab across the road from me that has thousands of printers so that when you have a printer in your home or office, if you get a new product from Microsoft, you have a predictable experience of that printer being able to print out of it. You’re not hoping that someone tested it in an ad hoc way but that someone put in a level of rigour and testing into that product you purchased.”

Hilf believes that Windows has now succeeded in getting that message across to enterprise users.

“In the past year, something really significant happened in the server space. For the first time ever, Windows Server is the number one server product shipping globally in the market, according to IDC. That’s a big statement. The fundamental question is why. It’s not because we have better marketing. It’s because we have created a lot of value in that product. When you think about the enterprise environment, where they Windows, Unix and Linux, we do a lot of focus on how you get all those different systems working together. We do a lot of interoperability testing in my lab.”

According to Hilf, the failure of Linux to make a dent in the desktop space until now underlines the point he makes about the difference Microsoft and its open source alternatives.

“I have run almost every major desktop distribution of Linux over the past decade to some degree or another,” he says. “Today, I don’t know the specific number but I would say Linux is at less than four percent of the total market share of the desktop. As a journalist, you could go back over the last eight years and look for the headline that says: ‘This is the year of the Linux desktop.’ It’s been out there at least once in a major IT publication over the past eight years. That headline has shown up and I actually have a bunch cut out in one of my old folders.