Winston Churchill named his experiences with major depression as his ‘black dog‘.

In a totally unrelated event Steve Ballmer was at the Churchill Club (in Silicon Valley) recently talking about his ‘red dog’ – Project Red Dog that is. Red Dog is basically EC2 for Windows, and is going to be given airtime at PDC in October (here’s Mary-Jo’s notes from April).

He also woffled on about Mobile devices, the threat of Google and how Apple is unlikely to increase market share in the personal computer space because they won’t license their software to others.

Steve rightly worries about Linux in the server space (Especially web servers) with Windows only having 40% of the share.

He has both a red dog and black one on his hands we suggest.

Company sponsored studies are by their very nature completely unreliable. It’s like trusting the medical advice the tobacco companies spun in the 70s.

So, take this latest ‘analysis‘ with a grain of salt. In it Microsoft finds that (amazingly!) it aint cheaper to use Linux than it is to use Microsoft (at least over a 5 year time span). Skills shortage is the main reason attributed (p7) with Linux professionals earning 12.5% more than equivalently experienced Microsoft professionals. Mary-Jo has the rundown.

Of course the numbers only apply to large deployments, so don’t go thinking it impacts any home consumer environment.

When it comes to deploying large numbers of computers to emerging markets (ie poor countries who desperately need to be given access to the right tools for internet-izing their people) why you’d want to go for Linux anyway is beyond us, surely you’d want an operating system that has all the cool Aero graphic capabilities.