More hardware and software options - yes. As to being more reliable, that remains to be seen as far as I am concerned. I mean honestly, has this ever really been looked into by a truly objective group? I tend to doubt it…

The chief Linux guru at Microsoft believes that Windows will maintain its dominance in the desktop space and increase its share in the server space because it is more reliable than Linux.

The director of platform strategy at Microsoft, Bill Hilf has lead the Linux and open source software technology group at Redmond for the past two years and formerly headed the global Linux technical strategy of IBM. He says reliability and predicability are the key factors which give Microsoft’s software the edge over Linux and open source alternatives.

Hilf says: “When I talk to a middle of the road customer that might be indifferent about Microsoft or Linux, one of the words they typically use with me is predictability. How do I know that the software is extraordinarily well tested and predictable?

“Some of the key differentiators are when I think about how we build software, a tremendous amount of investment and energy goes into testing to ensure the predictability of the software experience. So when you look at our products, some people say, ‘it takes forever to build a product at Microsoft, blah, blah, blah.’ It takes a long time to design a product and code it. It takes a really long time to test it where it’s going to be deployed across half a billion users – that’s a lot of work. Source: ITWire

Tags: microsoft, linux, software experience, investment, technical strategy, differentiators