((Long)) Microsoft and Open Source

[mowestusa]

On the 5/18/05 show you mentioned briefly at the end about the rumors floating around Red Hat and Microsoft. On 5/19/05 I attended a panel discussion on open source hosted in Toledo, OH by the Chief Information Officer Forum of Northwest Ohio. They opened the event up to the public for free, so some of the LUG members registered to attend.

At this panel discussion you had executives from IBM, Sun, Microsoft, Novell, HP, and Dell. Bill Hilf represented Microsoft as the Director of Platform Strategy Organization. The discussion remained calm, but most of the comments centered on Linux and open source in the server market. Only Jerry Mayfield from Novell defended strongly the idea of installing and migrating to Linux on the desktop. There were some interesting discussions during the 3 1/2 discussion, but I just want to highlight Bill Hilf's comments for you.

He pointed out that lots of bad press for MS centers on their desktops because there are so many people that are affected when a virus attacks them or when other troubles happen. He said MS doesn't get the good press for their 2005 Server remaining free from virus attack because there are not nearly the number of servers running 2005 Server compared to XP running on the desktop. He also said that MS has supported open source. MySQL uses the open source MS installer to have an error free install of their database on the Windows operating system. He also said that Openoffice is able to produce compatible documents to MS Office only because MS has switched to XML file spec that is open. Finally he said that Microsoft is in the business of making money from software, so they continue to believe in their business model of proprietary software, and he didn't see that changing. He also admitted that they view open source as competition, but he stressed how Windows can offer the user the full multimedia experience and work with so many devices. (Dann you mentioned this in commenting about their current ad strategy.)

After listening to the panel discussion I think MS considers open source a threat simply because they would love to take over as the OS that is run on every computer device, whether organizer, server, or desktop. I don't think we will ever see an open source MS Linux. However, we might see a similar move in MS as what Apple did in building off of BSD. They might buy a company like Red Hat simply to have the experts that could produce a Windows OS that is more similar to the pedigree of Unix.

Sorry for the length, but the talk at the end of the show sparked my thoughts.

Steve
mowestusa@yahoo.com