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Microsoft Advised To Learn To Love Linux
mikael writes "ZDnet is reporting that the management guru Clayton Christensen (author of "The Innovator's Dilemma") has advised Microsoft to learn to love Linux. In particular he advises Microsoft to purchase "Research in Motion", otherwise they will see their applications sucked off from the desktop and onto handheld devices such as the Blackberry."
1) MS Linux exists, and has existed, for a while. It'll appear whenever there's a business need for it.
2) What's stopping MS from having a non-GPL applications layer which enables them to deply Office and whatever they'd want on THEIR linux. Assume they'd charge a little under the standard distro's, or even include it in the cost of Office for Linux.
The only hassle will be hiding the DRM for said Office where it can't be seen/modified - so it can't go in the kernel, etc. Could a binary loadable MS Driver do this for them?
It's an obvious business tactic to mimic a competitor if he is successful. Microsoft has done that before, and still does: Look at their Monad shell, which is designed by a team with an extensive Unix background. Microsoft is slowly testing the open source waters (f. ex. FlexWiki).
It's not like another poster said that they fear it would undercut their Windows business. Why would there be an Office for Mac?
So in conclusion, thanks for telling me the world isn't flat, Mr. Christensen
How about: they won't bring Office to Linux because there aren't enough potential customers to justify the cost of the port?
There may be more Linux users than Mac users now, but I believe and I'm sure their market research must show, that a much smaller percentage of Linux users would actually purchase and use Office.
Netware (hammered throughout the 90s by Wintel servers) and Unixware (offloaded to Santa Cruz Operation after only about 3 years) was "all" that Novell had. They are going through a painful, but necessary and promising, transition into a software services company. I think the more accurate summation of MS' problem is that they've angered far too many people for far too long, and even if they take the Damascus road tomorrow they may find a severe lack of partners and customers would kill them instead.
Half-baked port of .NET to Linux w/ large licence costs.
That would be Mono then.
to allow Linux to be a node in network managed by XP.
And that one would be Samba!
New 'Services for Linux', half-baked Linux layer for NT.
Or how about Services for UNIX? Already up to version 3.5. Apart from that a very reasoned out comment.
If Microsoft really wanted to get rid of Linux they should do exactly what they did to Java. Create a horrible version of Linux. Release it as an easy to use Microsoft branded version of Linux but purposely cripple it. People that don't know any better will try to use it. They'll notice that it's doesn't work as good as Windows (Due to the crippling by MS) Microsoft will then say that it's not their fault, it's innate to Linux then everyone will run back to Windows and believe that Linux is innately broken just like Java.