Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Futures

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Help me understand how Microsoft might respond to Linux!

I have been asking myself the following question:

 

If Linux begins to capture significant desktop market share what options are open to Microsoft? 

 

In this article I have listed my initial ideas, and it would be great to get some feedback on the technical feasibility (some of them maybe plain crazy) and political acceptability of the options within Microsoft.  It might also be interesting to get feedback on how the Open Source and business communities might respond.

 

Here is my headline list, with each option described in more detail later:

 

  • “bet the company” on strategies to retain the consumer market

  • Make Windows a better host for Linux applications

  • Make Windows a better server for Linux Desktops

  • Make Linux a better host for Windows Applications

  • Make .NET the most attractive Linux Development Platform

  • Make Windows a better client to Linux Servers

  • Make Windows appeal to Open Source developers

  • Win the TCO and Security debate

  • Reduce the cost of Windows and Office

 

Retain the consumer market

 

  1. I have already blogged on this here

Make Windows a better host for Linux applications

 

  1. Purchase an existing X Server product to integrate into Windows Services For Unix…

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The Success of Open Source

By far it’s the best study in open source I have read. Starting from social, political, and economical views, he provides real and detailed insight into how Open Source works.  Unlike The Cathedral and the Bazaar which relies more on experience, this book relies on detailed analysis, and relates Open Source to well established political science thoery. He goes well beyond describing the origins and organization of the movement but also describing business models and roles that companies have been adopting to support and work with open source software. It’s a long book, and starts to falter towards the end but its well worth the effort if a thorough understanding is important to you.

“The Success of Open Source” is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what is open source and its relevance for today’s society.

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Sun’s strategy laid out for all to see!

In a remarkably frank interview Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, and Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive explained their strategy to ZDNet UK.  As I read the interview Jonathan’s blog entries started to take on a greater coherence.  I have extracted the guts of the interview here, and I have added links to a few relevant blog entries by Jonathan:

 

Step No. 1: Make the argument that Linux equals Red Hat. Linux has become a social force, with all of the free world supposedly cooperating to create an always improving operating system that is forever cheaper and more valuable than the old versions of Unix.

Sun’s view is that Linux is nothing more than Red Hat. The operating system is not about world peace and the charitable work of the world’s great programmers. It’s like every other operating system ever created: It’s about the foibles, greed, mistakes and engineering prowess (or lack thereof) of one vendor — in this case, Red Hat.

 

Step No. 2: Belittle Red Hat. By collapsing Linux into Red Hat, Sun now has a clear target. It can hammer away at a company, as opposed to …

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Tim Bray worries about WS-*

Tim and others are starting to worry that WS-* is getting out of control:

No matter how hard I try, I still think the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. I think it’s going to be hard to understand, hard to implement, hard to interoperate, and hard to secure

Now I want to make it clear that I am no expert on this, but I have followed the debate.  It seems to be that the reason that this stuff is getting so complex is so that developers don’t have to worry about it.  What the heck do I mean by that; well I mean that these spec’s are not meant to be implemented by developers, they will be implemented by the tools and libraries that the developers use.  At least that’s the impression I get when Don Box talks about Indigo.  I think he said something like, “I spent the last n years, before I joined Microsoft,  worrying about the plumbing”, then he said something like “Since I joined Microsoft I am working to make all that knowledge about the plumbing completely irrelevant”. 

My guess is that without a complete and comprehensive set of specifications, the tools …

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Great roundup of Windows Terminal Server products

For years, Citrix has been the only choice for software to power server-based computing environments. Sure, Microsoft’s Terminal Server products were out there, but their features paled in comparison to those of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server. However, as Terminal Server continues to gain ground as a standalone solution, many people...

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Getting in touch with your users

About 7 years ago I was in the fortunate position to establish a discussion forum to support a major desktop transformation programme I was doing.  The forum allowed users to have discussions directly with the architects and engineers who were responsible for their environment.  In addition it allowed the development team to post announcements, seek feedback, or drill into difficult to reproduce problems.

Developers and users alike loved the direct interaction that resulted.  Users felt they could get to the right people for once, and really understand why some touch decisions had been taken.  The development team gained a much better understanding and admiration for the users and how they exploited their environment.

Of course blogs are providing a similar mechanism today, for commercial products and I think blog authors or teams are getting a similar buzz from the direct and interactive feedback.  Ed Brill from Lotus writes:

In fact, there was a time where one of my managers told me that I was “wasting” too much time in the forums, and I just ignored the input.  Why?  Because I assert that my career success is based in part on my online community interaction.  It provides a connection between …

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Don Box, like me, finally tells it like it is

It’s nice to see that even Don Box, who has grown up on Object orientation, application integration and database middleware gets it: For better or worse, a significant amount of the world’s data is stored outside of relational DBMSs, specifically in Microsoft Word and Excel files. As these files move...

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Some good news about Longhorn

In this article, InfoWorld talks to Greg Sullivan, lead product manager at Microsoft, about Longhorn and reports: Although it is too early for specifics, Sullivan said Longhorn should be a better performing, more stable, and more secure operating system because it will be based on the Windows Server 2003 SP1 (Service...

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More on the Consumerization of IT

Nic, points out in a comment on this post titled The decline of enterprise influence over IT that CSC Research Services have recently published a report on Consumerization, which I have just read and must say makes very good reading, especially the first few pages.  One of the authors is currently thinking through some of the related personal responsibility issues.  This topic has sparked my interest and I have been talking through some of the implications with network, storage and infrastructure services architects.  It took a while for them to get it until I used the Internet Access analogy which we all lived through:

1.      When the internet was first established enterprises saw individual Internet access it as an activity of little interest, undertaken by enthusiasts only, with niche needs.

2.      Then they saw it as a threat as they noticed people with networked PC’s who also had active modem connections to the internet, they started to create policies to control it

3.      Then they saw it as a need, but only to be provided to the select few and only then in very controlled conditions

4.      Then the saw it as obvious …

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The benefits of WinFS

Given all of the negative talk about the delay to WinFS I just wanted to say that I have thought since I first glimpsed it that Microsoft are really onto something with WinFS, I have discussed it before but its timely to give my top five reasons again: 1.      It’s...