Ex-Microsofter Rick Belluzzo Prefers Linux

keird writes "I'm sure you all remember Belluzzo being pushed out of Microsoft earlier this year. ComputerWorld has a short, but interesting interview with him where he talks about why his new employer, Quantum uses Linux in their appliances." From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.

Comments

Make a Change :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes for a bit of a change since a long time ago when he destroyed SGI by persuading them to drop MIPS and IRIX and move to Windows NT.

Re:Make a Change :-)

[Chris Johnson]

Actually, that would be Porsche :)

What happened there was more complicated: Ferdinand Porsche had always been hot for a 'people's car', way before Hitler. He came up with the Volkswagen design for personal reasons, because it was the car he most wanted to build, the coolest thing he could think of.

Hitler was hot to industrialize Germany- very few people owned cars, and he wanted to build roads, get lots of Germans into cars, basically modernize the country. This too was a personal reason- German industrialists did not always believe Hitler when he wanted 'cheap people's' this and that, but they learned the hard way.

Porsche had to bid for the contract to be the one to build the 'people's car' and he did it by selling Hitler on the Volkswagen design with an amazing half-jargon half-layman spiel which basically convinced Hitler that the future VW was a brilliant, unorthodox, superior design (which it was, as they learned when trying to improve it later)

Having secured Hitler's support, Porsche then totally ignored everything in politics and got back to his work- this would be the moral lapse, even though he did not actively support the Nazis. Things would happen, like Porsche getting a letter saying "The Fuehrer wishes the greatest German auto designer to become a German citizen" and shrugging and saying (translated) "Well, I suppose nothing can be done about it- see that this is taken care of" and ignoring politics again. Passive support and failing to resist in any way.

Hitler never got any Volkswagens built for the German people- the plant was bombed and the economy collapsed. The VW plant fell into the hands of the British, whose opinion of the matter was, "this is a great car, these are great workers and designers who aren't responsible for the sins of their leaders, this plant belongs to the German people and we are here to see that it is returned to them, and flourishes". With their determined support, the first VWs started coming out in spite of terrible supply shortages, technical problems (like shattering torsion bars in the suspensions) were solved, and the story of the VW was underway no thanks to Hitler (it wasn't his idea, it was Porsche's, it just played into his populist tendencies)

I have this very neat book, 'Small Wonder', about it all...

Rocket Rick

[sql*kitten]

I'm sure you all remember Belluzzo being pushed out of Microsoft earlier this year. ComputerWorld has a short, but interesting interview with him where he talks about why his new employer, Quantum uses Linux in their appliances." From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.

"Rocket" Rick Belluzzo is also the man responsible for SGI's disastrous attempt to drop IRIX and MIPS in favour of x86 workstations running Windows NT. He also dropped the uber-groovy SGI cube logo for the lame "sgi". His "reward" for almost destroying a competitor was a cushy job at Microsoft. SGI have yet to recover and it's by no means certain that they will.

Does Linux really need supporters like this?

Re:Rocket Rick

[Ed Avis]

The 'going forward'-ometer registers a worryingly high reading on this article. Don't employ this man.

Not on Linux for long

[tomk]

In the interview he states:

Do you think Linux will be an obstacle to an effective partnership between Quantum and Microsoft? If Microsoft gives us a better idea and a better alternative, we could change.

I'd say it's pretty likely that MS will use a carrot-and-stick approach to force him onto Windows. Quantum is looking for a big deal with MS and with a high-profile ex-microsoftie singing the praises of the competition, I'll bet there's a threat that the deal will fall through: that's the stick. MS will probably also offer Quantum a much-discounted price on embedded Windows NT: that's the carrot.

In the end, Quantum will do whatever they need to do to help their bottom line. (not that I blame them.) If the deal with MS is worth more than the cost of Windows licenses, they'll be on Windows before you know it.

Re:First Intelligent Post

[gazbo]

Also, the bit that was cunningly not mentioned in the excerpt:

I don't think Linux is going to be successful as a desktop replacement. But Linux is going to surround new appliances...

Exactly what the more rational and less rabid of us have said all along. Linux has its place, which for most people is not the desktop.

Exactly

[rgraham]

From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.

Yes, use what will get the job done. People (pro-MS/anti-Linux, anti-MS/pro-MS, repeat for Solaris, Mac, BSD...) get so blinded by their allegence to one type of technology they don't realize or refuse to accept that there might be something better out there for a given use. Sitting on my desk right now I have machines running Win2k, OSX and RedHat 7.1 all of which I use for different tasks. Could I use just one OS for all my tasks? Sure, but I perfer to use what works best in a given situation.

Does this mean we will see commercials like this?

[one9nine]

"I'm Rick Belluzzo and I'm the former president and chief operating officer of Microsoft Corp."

www.linux.com/switch

Not far enought back

[WindBourne]

Rick started at HP and at point ordered 350K engines from canon. He then later went to canon and apologized to the workers who were being laid off. For that screw-up, HP promoted him to being in charge of HP' desktop computers, where he merged the unix desktop and desktop system together. He managed to kill the Unix desktop, while saying that he would build it up. When his division was headed down, he went to SGI, where he did his best to destroy irix and SGI. He left MS when their numbers are starting down (yes profits are up, but numbers are down). Now, he is at Quantum, where he has sold off half the company, and it was running Linux. MS is knocking on the door. Guess which road rick will go down? I predict that Quantum will be gone in about 2 years or less.

Re:First Intelligent Post

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Because most end users are cheap.

This is a common misconception. If most end users were cheap, they'd build their own computers from parts instead of buying a Gateway or a Dell or a what-have-you.

Most end users are impatient and lazy. (Not in the derogative sense; I, too, am impatient and lazy, and chances are you are too.) They run Windows or Mac OS for the same reason that they buy their computers pre-assembled: because they can get up and running faster and with less work.

Linux is not easy to use (making it unappealing to the lazy), and what's worse it's not easy to learn (making it unappealing to the impatient). Giant changes would have to happen before Linux could become any of those things. The people who work on Linux have no motivation to make those giant changes. So I don't see it happening.

I think there's one scenario in which Linux could become a viable desktop alternative. A large and profitable company could adopt Linux, base a business plan on it, and make the necessary changes to make it easy to use and easy to learn. The company would have to be large and profitable because Linux would require a great deal of work to get where it needs to be, and the company would have to be able to survive spending a fortune on Linux for a few years while they do what they need to do.

There's one big thing, I think, that will prevent this from happening: the GPL. Any company that does any proprietary work on Linux will be forced to give its source code away to anybody who asks for it, making it impossible for that company to have a competitive edge in the marketplace. That takes the wind out of the old business plan.

Of course, Apple already did exactly this. They just based their OS on FreeBSD instead of Linux. So the idea is sound; it's just that in GPL-land, there's no possibility of commercial motivation, which means no reason to invest the necessary time and work.

Server operating systems, naturally, don't have to be easy to use or to learn at all. That's why companies like IBM and SGI are shipping big servers that are built from the ground up to run Linux: they only have to make a few changes to the OS to get it to do what their customers need, and their competitive advantage is the hardware, so releasing the source code of their OS is no big deal to them.