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MS Hires The Salesman Who Won Munich For SUSE
ron_ivi writes "In a move reminiscent of the 1997 MSFT/Borland Lawsuits, Microsoft has hired the SUSE sales guy who won Munich for SUSE.
So if you want a job in this tough job market, just be wildly successful at your current job and Microsoft will come recruit you. (Another interesting Microsoft hire is the chair of the ISO C++ standards body as their VisualC++.NET architect.) Personally I think it's great that they recognize talented individuals and reward them well."
Yes, it's war, and microsoft is not above recruiting the enemy's best lieutenants.
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Microsoft is well known for their great hiring practices. I know quite a few of thier employees and they all are some of the best in the fields they specialise in. MS is pretty good at weeding out the chaff.
In God we trust, all others require data.
In sales it's all about making the money. I bet M$ will pay him better then anyone else has the ability to. Not a bad deal for him.
Evolution or ID?
Personally I think it's great that they recognize talented individuals and reward them well.
Or did they hire him to make him less of a threat?
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Are you kidding?
Am I the only one that sees this as buying out the competition? Let's see, some guy successfully beat us at selling a competitive O/S. Let's hire him so that never happens again. And some guy is making the world better by furthering a standard. Let's hire him so that our C++ becomes the only stardard the world must follow.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
So if you want a job in this tough job market, just be wildly successful at your current job...
Thanks for turning the obvious into yet another anti-MS rant. Perhaps you should go into the inspirational poster business.
Why not hire those you think are best if you can afford them? And I'm not seeing these people being conscripted.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
So people trusted this guy to switch 10k machines to linux. Now, how will people look at his face when he is promoting windows OVER linux? Seems there isn't such thing as integrity.
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isn't that he won't eventually give it all away or do some good, I believe him when he says that he will. However, people like Gates and those that run Microsoft have very little faith in people. Their arrogance is hard to beat. Even for such wildly successful people as those new hires, I wouldn't doubt for a second that they are getting a mere fraction of what Microsoft makes off them. Why would a proposed philanthropist such as Gates withhold all that cash, even from their "wildly successful" new hires? I think the answer is simple, he doesn't have faith in people to do the right thing with that money. This is of course if we take Gates at his word when he says he wants to help people with that money. While Bill Gates may eventually give talented people a chance, the damage he has done to the system by hoarding all that cash and unfairly eliminating competition far outweighs the benefits that will happen when he does give it away.
Or else Msoft will get their sh!# together and there will be no reason to ever switch.
why is this news? He quit SuSE in 2003 and he got a new job.
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There are no job offer NDAs; so Microsoft wouldn't offer Linus a job they were not pretty sure he would take. It would be a PR nightmare. Besides, it's pretty clear, thanks to the GPL, that the only thing Linus can do for Microsoft is to stop working on Linux... sure as hell he won't
What hasn't Microsoft bought?
"Competitors", "regulators", "reviewers", EU fines, settlements with Sun, Minnesota, AOL-Netscape, Apple bailout, etc. It's all just the cost of doing business as a monopoly.The marketplace is still working, just not in the way we might have hoped or imagined.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
IANAL, but I believe that anything Linus himself has written (unless it is work for hire) he can fork on a different license at whim - he just can't revoke the GPL on code already released under it.
Sales is about selling... it has precious little to do with making the world a better place.
Herb Sutter mentions planned C++/.Net CLR extensions being discussed for later inclusion in the C++ standard in last months C/C++ Journal. (Sorry, there is no link on their site yet.) I thought it odd that the chairman of such a standards board would mention M$ proprietary software so favorably. Then I saw that he works for M$ and understood perfectly. No conflicts of interest here. Enough to make you sick. I wonder what Stroustoup thinks of this. What next? A Microsoftie on Sun's Java steering committee perhaps?
an ill wind that blows no good
Did you ever see the movie "The Devil's Advocate"? Same principle in operation here.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
"In a move reminiscent of the 1997 MSFT/Borland Lawsuits..."
This is *nothing* like the Borland lawsuit. Your own link says that's about hiring a large number of key staff thus draining the business.
This is about hiring one key person. Apart from hiring from a competitor (standard practice) there is no resemblance at all.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
add to the fact that cars are already packed with electronics, a computer and complex software, and maybe it's time to send resumes to big car companies as well.
How is that the moral of the story?
Dude showed himself to be a hell of a salesman, and a big corp took notice, and came and offered him a metric assload of cash to come work for them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not once, but TWICE you wrote micro$oft... You can't tell me that you didn't feel like a boob while you were typing that. When are people going to learn that it's not funny and it's not cool. Yes, Microsoft has a lot of money, we get it.
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
There's a very simple term for this kind of hiring. It's called "smart business". If somone proves that they can do something great for your competitors, like pull off a massive sales coup, then that's the kind of guy you want on your staff. The same applies to engineering, politics, and a host of other enterprises.
For example, the guy who designed the S2000 for Honda designed the 300ZX turbo for Nissan. (Both are benchmark designs for the auto industry.) David Gergen worked for both the Nixon and the Clinton administrations. (He may have worked for Reagan, but I'll need to check to be sure.) Hilary Clinton was president of her college's chapter of the Young Republicans, and technology companies exchange employees regularly.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
"...Personally I think it's great that they recognize talented individuals and reward them well."
Yeeeaaa... that's been the M$ employee experience. NOT!
Maybe this guy was successful because SUSE is an actual solution to business technology?
Steve Jobs talked to Linus Torvalds about hiring him. He mentioned it in an interview. It's no big deal, and not a "PR nightmare"--well, on Slashdot everyone would suddenly claim it's a PR nightmare, but outside this little niche nobody else would care!
It's called having a job. If you're a salesperson, guess what? You sell what you're HIRED TO SELL!
Only on Slashdot, made up mostly of college students and unemployed, would it be considered a bad thing and a "lack of integrity" to sell things for one company and then go over and sell things for another.
It's not like the rest of the world views everything as "Windows vs. Linux" like you do. It's just another product the guy's gonna be selling. More power to him! The anti-capitalism mindset that permeates around here is so silly sometimes.
A very brief peek of Microsoft's career website shows that that's probably not Microsoft's standard practice. For one, do a job search on their page. A LOT ot bachelor's degrees there. Second, have a peek at their tuition reimbursement page.
"I have nothing against Linus, but he makes decisions for Linux primarily based on the idea that it's a "hacker's OS""
I think that's a bit of a stretch. Linus isn't dumb you know. He is well aware where Linux is being used and is very much interested in getting Enterprise Level features into the kernel. Look at all of the scalibility work that's gone on since 2.0. Do you think that Linus thinks this is so that some code junkie can mess around with his machine at home? Contrary to what you implied the Linux kernel is driven by market forces. Look at the impact that SGI, IBM etc have had since they got involved. Big business has made it very clear what they need and the kernel hackers have answered. I'm not implying that they or Linus are some sort of corporate lacky, but they are not coding with blinders on either.
Maybe somehow I'm in the wrong here, but your version of how Linus views the kernel seems like a view from 1994. Your right, he probably doesn't *care* about Microsft or world domination, but don't think that the kernel isn't very much driven by corporate and market needs at this point.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The difference is, Microsoft caught onto this idea only after a decade of giving everyone complete rights to everything. Don't think that tradition isn't relevant.
Last Christmas, my mom got herself a laptop. I tried to set it up right, with her as a limited user with access to an administrative account. A couple of months back, my brother installed a wireless card on my mom's laptop. But the software installed kept popping up this message box every thirty seconds. After a good deal of hunting, the only solution my brother could find was to give mom's account full administrative privileges. The software simply assumed that it had write access to the registry.
Multiply that by thousands of lazy application writers, each demanding elevated privileges for common user tasks, and suddenly Microsoft has this huge cultural inertia to overcome.
Whether widespread adoption of Linux will drag it in the opposite direction remains to be seen. Though, given the whole "Lindows" thing, I'm certainly concerned.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
In the process of reorganizing, they'll probably make several decisions that will make Linux more competitive in the marketplace
;-)
Possibly, but I think it would be hard to dispute that removing a project's leader would create problems for the project. Fortunately, the linux kernel team is deep enough that they problably could recover from losing Linus.
Anyhow, that wasn't my point. Microsoft does have a great tradition of buying up the competition, and the article shows that this applies to not only companies, but individuals. Linus is the king in this world, but I could have mentioned others like Alan Cox (who apparrantly has had an offer) or Miguel de Icaza (who would probably consider it
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Of what use is the opinion of someone who is paid to think a certain way?
being anti-capitalism doesn't have anything to do with it.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Of course the kernel can be distributed in binary form. But all kernel modules that it uses have to be compiled against that particular kernel. A minor configuration change and recompile will invalidate every binary module on your disk. This makes things like NVidia and ATI drivers particularly difficult.
NVidia got tied of trying to chase around every kernel version and released a binary lib that gets linked against some kernel "glue" that's distributed in source form. Most vendors don't even bother. If NVidia didn't have such good support for Linux, ATI almost surely wouldn't have *any* support.
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"Keep your friends close ... and your enemies closer"
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Your brother not knowing how to deal with this is not the same as the OS being insecure. He should have given the account write access to the one section of the registry it wanted to touch (you can put an ACL on any regkey), rather than making the account admin. Someone could just as easily try to deal with a problem on a unix system by always running as root or unnecessarily making lots of files mode 777.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I would say that it's a bit doubtful, for a couple reasons.
First, Linus is first and foremost a kernel developer. As far as I can tell, Microsoft does not go in for particularly heavy development on their kernel.
Second, they know that it's unlikely that Linus would take it. Linus could make a lot more money by working at Red Hat or similar, but has chosen not to do so to avoid biasing Linux. He really likes doing the open source Linux, and it's unlikely that he'd stop doing something that he really likes doing (for Chrissake, he has a world-famous software product named after him) for something that he doesn't like doing as much but gets more money for.
Third, Linus is a nice, highly visible person. He'd be great for a tech company that wants to say "Linus Torvalds works here", but normally big software companies are going to want to keep their kernel developers a bit more under wraps -- they don't want people and media constantly prodding them and increasing the chance that information about new features will leak.
Fourth, while Linus is a skilled hacker, his most extensive experience is with the Linux kernel. Honestly, there are certainly going to be people out there more familiar with Microsoft's work.
If MS eventally loses enough of the market -- and I think that this will happen, though probably later than sooner -- they will probably quite happily operate selling an "MS Linux" distribution, just like companies that pushed formats competing with CD-R eventually fell into line. There are lots of ways to establish monopolies with a Linux distribution -- Microsoft's favorite tools, closed formats and protocols, are still available. *Then* having Linus onboard might be useful. But, I think, not in the current environment.
May we never see th
you've picked a bad example there, mate. it's standard on unix to have to be root to install a driver as well.
windows xp has the runas command and fast user switching now to help with this problem.
stay frosty and alert