In late March Microsoft and Unisys launched a publicity campaign against Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and every other competitor that runs UNIX -- including Linux -- on its big systems. The campaign was scheduled to run for 18 months and cost upwards of the $25 million that Unisys said it was spending alone on the project.
Rather than compete on the merits of the Microsoft's and Unisys' competitive product offerings, the company decided to wage the high tech equivalent of a negative political campaign. Titled "We have the way out", the campaign incredibly accuses UNIX of cornering customers in an expensive box. One ad says "No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It make you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever".
As if this were not sufficiently irony-free, the campaign's Web site, wehavethewayout.com, was found to have been served by Apache on FreeBSD. After that bad publicity became news, the site was moved to Windows, first at the same Verio hosting service, and then at Unisys. But in the process it went dark, displaying either a blank white page or a 403 error message.
Later the page came back up, offering membership in "our ecommunity" and five .pdf papers to download. The Web page was copyrighted by Unisys Corporation.
The campaign was reportedly intended to promote Unisys' ES7000 server and the Datacenter version of Windows 2000, which can run on machines with as many as 32 processors. Unisys faces an uphill battle in this category -- not only with Sun and HP, which have had strong UNIX offerings for many years, but from IBM's new eServers, which run either Linux or Microsoft OSes on systems with up to 16 processors and sell at lower prices than Unisys' ES7000s. CNET also reports that only "a few hundred" ES7000 servers have been sold, and that "sales partnerships with Dell, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have all fallen apart".
Naturally s new site called wehavethewayin.com appeared shortly after the wehavethewayout.com fell on its face. With pointers to all the leading UNIX variants, wehavethewayin.com says "These days, with enough money, a report or statistic can be printed that says anything. Usually this is done because those with enough money want to make others believe their lies. Make sure that you are reading a genuine article and not a paid-for lie." The page is copyrighted by Jon Fields of LinuxFreak.org. Shortly after it went up, Fields reported more than 400,000 hits to the page.