Microsoft’s Hilf says Windows more reliable than Linux

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 15 March 2006 07:46

Opinion and Analysis

“It’s not that I don’t love our press community. Hey, we all get it wrong at some point. There’s actually a reason behind that. One of the things I was talking about in terms of being predictable and being supportive and having a level of quality with software that always works, the audience is that is most difficult is my mother, the consumer. The non-technical desktop user will not suffer software that has not been thoroughly tested with their devices. They need to go to an electronics store to buy a digital camera or a printer or a software application and have it just work.

“The threshold for success in the desktop marketplace is very difficult. It’s very different from having IT people in a data centre who can actually work their way through a technical problem and getting into the plumbing if they need to. People have been working hard on Linux desktops and I actually know quite a few of them. But if you look at the growth of Linux in the server space as opposed to desktops, it’s not because people decided to work on server stuff and not the desktop; it’s because it’s extraordinarily hard to have the target of my mother and be successful against that target in terms of having a high quality product. I actually encourage people to do evaluations for themselves of a Windows desktop and a Linux desktop side by side in the real world.”

According to Hilf, the gap between Windows and Linux as a usable desktop product will widen further with the release of the new 64-bit version of Windows, Vista.

“I just told you a story about having software that’s highly reliable and predictable and tested. Well that story gets massively better with Vista. I am in the engine works of how we think about Vista when it comes to that. I know that bar is going to be raised very high so that the threshold is going to be even further of what the default behaviour for a lot of people will be. It will raise expectations in the marketplace of what you can do with a personal computer.”

So what’s it like being a Linux person inside Microsoft?

“It’s a very interesting role to be in. I think I had some expectations when I joined that I might be an extremely lonely person here or that people would reject. It was totally the opposite. Inside Redmond, there are a lot of very technical people who are curious about all types of technology. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about how software gets built at this scale. When you think about a billion users for a given piece of code, there’s a lot of stuff you have to put into thinking that way, to make sure it works consistently. So I’m constantly doing that delta in my head where I’m thinking: ‘Boy, how would I do that in Apache or Firefox or some other open source application.’

“We’re also looking at people who decided to develop and license their software in an open source way and they want to do that on Windows. There is a lot of learning going on now between Microsoft and the open source community and other software vendors. These days we’re actually trying to work together rather than fight each other.”