Microsoft officials recently made it clear that one of their objectives for the next 12 months is to do better at picking off more Unix migrators than archrival Linux. They feel they have left some low hanging fruit on the tree by not being aggressive enough in better educating the Unix fence sitters on the technical and financial merits of tossing their venerable operating system in favor of Windows.The company tried to do exactly that during the last year via its “Get the Facts” campaign, which attempts to take out the religious aspects of choosing between Windows and Linux and consider only the hard, cold technical and financial facts.“What I found in talking to Unix users the past year is they thought the gains in going to Linux were so great they weren’t even considering Windows. So now, and going through the next year, we will spend even more time trying to make them understand there is even greater value in moving from Unix to Windows,” said Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s chief Linux strategist in Redmond, Wash. “It is having some effect because users are telling us now they are starting to do their own analysis of the situation,” Taylor said. Late last week however, Chairman Bill Gates, addressing an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., got a bit testy when someone piped up that almost 50 percent of servers being purchased now are running Linux. Chairman Bill responded bluntly. “First, it’s just not a right number,” he said. “Well over 50 percent of servers that are sold run Windows Server.” He added that it is Unix and not Windows being displaced by Linux and that the shift of Unix share to Linux has been dramatic. Hmmm. Seems even the good chairman is admitting Mr. Taylor’s work is cut out for him over the next 12 months. – Ed Scannell Technology Industry