Way out, Microsoft!

[ciphergoth]

From Linux Weekly News:

Anti-Unix campaign has opposite results. Late last week, CNET News.com introduced the news that Microsoft and Unisys were to team up in a large and well-funded marketing campaign against Unix. The 18-month, $25 million campaign, dubbed "We have the Way Out", would specifically attack the Unix offerings of Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.

On Monday, however, CNET learned and published the ironic news that the website for this campaign is actually running on Unix, specifically, FreeBSD and Apache. While this fact alone would certainly provide more than enough fodder to make the Unix crowd rejoice, amazingly the fun doesn't stop there.

Once the server's operating system discovery was made and publicly revealed, Microsoft and Unisys wasted no time in moving the server to a Windows-based system. Since the switch was completed on Tuesday, however, the server has not been able to serve pages. At the time of this writing, the server is continuing to display a blank screen with the lonely message "No web site is configured at this address.", which appears to nicely summarize the true message that is being sent via this campaign.

It seems to be working now: www.wehavethewayout.com. Apparently it was down for two days. But what an appalling website! The parody website, www.wehavethewayin.com is rather better organised...

Update: The Independent are carrying the story! The brief article about it on Page 9 of the Review section concludes "So the lesson is, if you're a big corporation and want to set up a website quickly and reliably, use Unix. If you want to make a prat of yourself, try Microsoft."