English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

For my second research blog I'm analyzing the best research I've found to date. This is a comprehensive article that compares open source products to their Microsoft counterparts in lots of ways including cost and performance. The article specifically considers Apache vs IIS, OpenOffice vs Office, GNU/Linux vs Windows, and Mozilla vs IE. These are identified in the research as being at the forefront of the open source software movement, and are the easiest to use and transition to from Microsoft products.

There is so much useful information from this study it can't all be covered here, but some of the highlights include breaking some of the stereotypes of "Why Software is Good". Many believe when making a decision of what software to use, that they should use whatever "everybody" else is using. In other words, choose the software with the biggest market share. According to the study, in April of 2006, IIS overtook Apache as the dominant marketshare web server technology, if only for a short time. Microsoft used this as a marketing ploy, highlighting that it is clearly the "best" since it has more market share. However, when choosing software to use as a web server, much more important questions should lead to your solution, such as "What types of server side scripting will my server need to support?" If the answer is ASP.NET, IIS is probably the better answer, but if the answer is PHP, Apache is certainly the way to go.

This research including multiple graphs and figures that analyze everything from TCO, to important features of open source and Microsoft software, can be used in almost every part of the White Paper. The author's key finding's can be highlighted in pull out quotes, figures and graphs can be utilized for visuals, and the text itself can be quoted or summarized for our use.