There's No FUD Like an Old FUD

As readers of these posts may know, I am something of a connoisseur of Microsoft's FUD. So I was interested to come across what looked like a new specimen for my collection:

"One of the beauties of the open-source model is that you get a lot of flexibility and componentization. The big downside is complexity," Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's director of platform strategy, said on the sidelines of the company's worldwide partner conference in Boston last month.

Alas, digging deeper showed this is hardly vintage FUD. Take, for example, the prime witness for the prosecution:

IBS Synergy had started developing products for the Linux platform back in 1998 but gave Linux the boot in early 2004, and now builds its software on the Windows platform. Lim said this was because the company's developers were spending more time hunting for Linux technical support on the Web, and had less time to focus on actual development work.

Right, so these are problems a company had two and half years ago: why is Microsoft raising them now? And is it not just possible that things have moved on somewhat in those 30 months?

So really this is the old "there are too many distributions, you can't get the support" FUD that was so unconvincing that I didn't even bother including it in my FUD timeline above. After all, businesses tend to use, well, Red Hat, SuSE and er, well, that's about it, really. (Via tuxmachines.org.)