I take issue with this Register story, which says Veritas has a better name in the storage arena than Microsoft.

Enron has a better name in the storage arena than Veritas. Ditto BALCO and FEMA and Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart.

So Microsoft wants to get into the backup business? Good.

I gave three of the best years of my life to the shrink-wrapped stool sample that is Backup Exec. I believed, wrongly, that the Constitution protects sysadmins like me from that piece of software in the clause that mentions cruel and unusual punishment.

After that last job put me out with Thursday night's garbage, one question I always asked on job interviews was what they used for tape backups. Had anyone said Backup Exec, I would have walked out of the room immediately.

Nobody did. That was good. There are still some smart people in the world. My confidence in humanity was somewhat restored.

Microsoft's offering will no doubt have problems, but when batch files and Zip drives are more reliable than your competition, who cares? Backup software is one area that desperately needs some competition. Microsoft entering with its usual less-than-mediocre offering will force everyone else with their less-than-mediocre offerings to either improve or die, because Microsoft's offering will be cheaper, and there will be people who will assume that Microsoft's offering will work better with Windows because nobody knows Windows better than Microsoft. (In this case, that assumption might actually be true.)

What's wrong with Backup Exec? Ask your friendly neighborhood Veritas sales rep what they've done about these issues:

If a Backup Exec job backing up to disk contains both disk and system state data and it's the second job to run on a given night, it will fail just as certainly as the sun coming up the next morning. Unless they finally managed to fix that bug, but I doubt it. I sure reported it enough times.

Remote backups happening over second-tier switches (D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, and other brands you find in consumer electronics stores) usually fail. Not every time. But more than half the time.

Those are just the problems I remember clearly. There were others. I remember the Oracle agent liked to die a horrible death for weeks at a time. I'd do everything Veritas support told me to do and it'd make no difference. Eventually it'd right itself and inexplicably run fine for a few months.

Maybe competition will fix what support contracts wouldn't. And if it doesn't, maybe Backup Exec will die.

And if Backup Exec must die, I want to be part of that execution squad. Remember that scene in Office Space with the laser printer and the baseball bat?

I never thought I'd say this, but now I'm saying it.

Welcome, Microsoft.