You gotta be kidding: The campaign that turned into an April Fools

The saga of Microsoft and Unisys-sponsored anti-Unix campaign embarrassment continued way after April 1, as a Microsoft top executive head unexpectedly rolled.

The saga of Microsoft and Unisys-sponsored anti-Unix campaign embarrassment continued way after April 1, as a Microsoft top executive head unexpectedly rolled.

For those that aren't in the know here's a recap.

Within 24 hours of its launch, a Microsoft and Unisys campaign web site devoted to convincing Unix users to switch to Windows was discovered by investigative netizens to actually be powered by Unix.

After presses uncovered the gaffe, rumours abounded the net that it was actually a hoax, or an April Fools joke. Then, to Microsoft's utter shame, it was discovered to be true.

From then on it's like car full of clowns in a front on collision in slow motion to see this gaffe spin out to a full fledge marketing disaster.

The site, called "We have the way out" at www.wehavethewayout.com, was launched without fanfare on Monday in the US.

By late Monday afternoon, however, reports revealed that the site was itself powered by servers running open source Unix FreeBSD and the Apache web server.

On Tuesday, as the presses got hold of the faux pas and ran with it, the two vendors hurried to save face by switching the site over from the Unix platforms to a Microsoft Internet Information Server.

Throughout the day, perhaps as a result of the switch over, the site appeared to have been down. Repeated attempts to reach the site be newshounds revealed either the all-white "Error 403" error message, the "Directory Listing Denied" errors, or a cryptic message to the effect that "no web site is configured at this address".

The two giants pulled their head in turtle-like and went into full control mode as Unisys declined to comment on the whether the site had been pulled down, and a Microsoft representative had said the company would look into the matter.

Last Thursday was day three of the saga and the site was up. However, it appears that a high level Microsoft executive has taken the fall for the whole fracas and has been shown the Way Out. Rick Belluzzo, president, COO, XBox marketing guru unexpectedly resigned amid a "restructuring".

The Inquirer speculated that the break up was not all rosy as Beluzzo was in charge of the launch of Xbox, which is facing poor sales in Japan. The Inquirer also reports Beluzzo had an "argy bargy" with Balmer.

Meanwhile, The Register investigated the new We Have the Way Out website to see if it was vanilla MS.

"The server yesterday revealed that some interesting ports were left open. The most interesting of which is port 3306, which is used by MySQL and Postgres. Since wehavethewayout.com was a BSD/Apache combination, it was almost certainly running an open source database, too. While Unisys has switched the front-end server to Windows IIS, the most likely explanation for keeping this port open is that the back-end still interfaces to a MySQL database. MySQL is cross platform, and there's a Windows version too. This would certainly make for a rapid port, as it doesn't require a rewrite of the cgi scripts."

The Register promises to bring the official confirmation soon.

The one good side of this was, although the campaign blunder only existed for a few days, the army of Unix and Linux supporters are still wiping a tear from the ol' eye.

-Bon Phyre