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Meet Microsoft's Linux Lab Head Bill Hilf
morcego writes "Yahoo News has a very interesting interview with Bill Hilf, Microsoft's director of Microsoft's platform technology strategy group, who in turn works for Martin Taylor, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy and Linux point man. From the interview: '"I am a non-Microsoft guy working at Microsoft," Hilf said.'"
What's up with the 'nothing to see' errors? I have been getting plenty of them lately.
It's nice to know that at least somebody there has some understanding of open source/Linux/alternatives. From most the FUD we keep seeing lately it makes me wonder if Microsoft would ever get a clue. Of course, this could just be some master plot by Bill to get us all thinking he is being understanding, before he ships us off to the Galapacos Islands and destroys us all with a ray gun.
I am a non-Microsoft guy working at Microsoft.
Funny, that statement could also apply to Laura DiDio.
tell me when a MS guy works for, say, RedHat.. (if it happens)
I just RTFA, and there is no content at all.
Let me summarize for you:
Bill Hilf works for Microsoft, reporting on the progress and direction of the open source projects and the OSS community in general.
There, now you can go do something more important than read this article.
Hilf says he spends a lot of time "making Linux more transparent to Microsoft managers."
Hmm... I guess this means he's trying to eliminate the competition between linux and windows. Is it just me, or does this seem to not be working?
a non-Microsoft guy working at Microsoft
you had me at #!
Bill Hilf is a TRAITOR! Lets tar and feather him! Have him drawn and quartered! Send him off the plank! Put him in an iron maiden!
Grammar Nazi
"Hilf said he still hears the same-old, predictable questions and perceptions regarding Microsoft's open-source strategy and intentions. His top five:
# When will Microsoft open source X (Microsoft commercial product)?
# Why don't you build X (Microsoft commercial product) so it runs on Linux?
# Microsoft is all-about closed source.
# Microsoft is anti-open source.
# Microsoft is always less secure than every open-source product on every front."
what the hell is this shit?
wow, that's a great article. let's have the guy talk about the predictable common questions that he gets. and not seek an answer. at all.
despite the fact that everyone is obviously interested, since those questions/concerns always come up.
i think we can assume that microsoft's answer to all those questions is "FOAD" or some variation. nevertheless, that guy is still an idiot, and the article still sucks.
big time.
From article: "In addition to acting Microsoft's good cop on open source, Hilf also runs the Microsoft Linux lab" Is this Microsoft Linux distro open-source? Where do I get it?
Aha, he's being very open for a Linux spy in Microsoft.
Admirable.
They have a load of *nix servers and PCs, yet frequently new M$ products fail to work with 3rd party clients/interfaces/servers. It sounds like he Microsoft's gimp for building systems that their engineers can write software to NOT work on.
I work at an Apple Store in the Seattle area previously mentioned in a slashdot article. I think its worth noting that a lot of Microsoft people buy non microsoft products. For instance one microsoft employee came in and bought a Mac Mini. Of course there is no PPC Windows Edition so its quite obvious that Microsoft people are acknowledging other products besides their own.
Microsoft are not scared of linux. Microsoft are not afraid of loosing out to linux. Microsoft are the innovators.
Yet they feel the need to get a linux guy to set up a lab to watch linux evolving along with the numerous paid shill/fud articles about the TCO of linux v windows.
MICROSOFT is SCARED of linux !
go Linux.
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
Hilf? As in "hacker I'd like to fuck"?
"I thought I'd have gotten a lot of 'it's crap if it's not built here,' attitude," he said.
Not to start a flamewar, but I'm told by someone knowledgable that IBM's not-built-here mindset is legendary, and second only to the US government.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
What I'm missing here is if they use e.g. PHP Accelerator for their benchmarking. That's known to speed up PHP scripts a lot. Also, I wonder if interoperability here means backing away from the broken-protocols strategy?
see a Text Widget
They take in a Linux guy (if thats what he really is), to be able to figure out why people are so motivated to work on OSS. He's their labrat.. I assume they still let him work on OSS projects so he remains a Linux guy. A real Linux dude will do his best to setup secure servers against MS servers, instead of jilted servers to prove Linux has a higher TCO.
They should ideally also keep him around to (1) constantly criticize MS from within (2) keep a testbench of MS-OSS projects they could sell in the future... like samba code in windows networking, and stuff like Xen, and other filesystems in win32/64.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
"We get to find out lots of interesting things -- like how to authenticate against Active Directory, how to run non-Microsoft mail clients with Exchange," and the like, [Bill Hilf] said.
"Once we figure a way to for other products to interoperate with Microsoft, my job is to modify our product so the other products won't work," he added. "It's helps a great deal when I get to look at our competitors code, but they can't see ours."
At this point, he chuckled a bit to himself while twisting his pencil-thin mustache with his fingers.
Software Wars
The article mentioned that he was "senior director of engineering for eToys". I don't know about the website, but in terms of core business functions: warehousing, order system... etoys was fundamentally a VMS shop not a Unix shop at all (not a Microsoft shop either, so...). Obviously a guy who was a VMS expert needs to find new work but I did find it interesting since its unclear whether he really is a Linux expert at all. OTOH etoys was a pretty well run place destroyed by the anti-ebusiness backlash of the early 2000's. So he's seen the anti-PC model (big centralized servers providing many services with desktops just providing a series of thin clients to mainframe/mini apps) done right.
Anyway in terms of etoys dismantling it was a waste. While I certainly agree their early business model assumed that people were ready to move in huge numbers from toy-stores to the web, and that there was no need to bet the farm on rapid growth to the extent they did, once you spend the fortune they did on their warehouse system it seems crazy not to have kept the ebusiness alive. etoys was a great place to buy toys and as Amazon can certainly attest ebusiness has been growing rapidly for the last 9 years just not at say 20% a quarter or anything.
There is an interview with Martin Taylor and Bill Helf in two parts on Channel9.
Interesting stuff...
A speech...
Check out the video on Channel 9. >a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostI D=65355">http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?Po stID=65355
They talk about some stuff, then go inside the lab, where they are testing clustering on a Linux distro and have racks and racks of different distros (and reveal that the copmany favorite is apparently...Gentoo!)
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
*WHY* the hell would you even want to interview someone with a director-level title at a company like Microsoft? You're going to get a 100% content-free interview, as people at that position get there by being as utterly devoid of opinions, content or anything else interesting, except for their Jedi mind-trick: a list of "completed deliverables" that more senior managers can't help but throw money at.
Why not interview someone more rank and file who actually does the work of pounding out OSS install and maintenance at Mickeysloth? They probably are more like real people with real opinions and might have something interesting to say, instead of the diet-caffeine-and-coloring-free management.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=6535 5
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
"We get to find out lots of interesting things -- like how to authenticate against Active Directory, how to run non-Microsoft mail clients with Exchange," and the like, he said.
This isn't thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft routinely writes their stuff with incompatibilities in mind while stealing the protocols, and likely chunks of open source.
But fortunately as a percentage of the world Microsoft's dominance is decaying as many new countries are opting out of the blind following of Microsoft. I think TCO cost and security might have a lot to do with it.
I still predict Microsoft Linux at some future point when market share and mass migration takes place. In the mean time there is too much dollars in selling the old pooch.
In the mean time I will not get sucked into Microsoft is open source friendly as the duality of intent here is obvious.
Of course, perhaps they *are* doing so, and Longhorn will be so good they won't need to try to reverse engineer Linux anymore, and this Lab can switch over to start looking into MacOS.
I read this to mean that Microsoft's competitive advantage against other proprietary software vendors like Apple is that Microsoft uses Linux internally.
Interesting! Makes you wonder exactly how this is their Linux use becomes their competitive advantage, though - is it through "borrowing" features (hope not code, though, because of the GPL) - or is it through running their enterprise systems on Linux. That would make more sense, you wouldn't want those running on windows, would you.
(at least not until Longhorn, which will fix all the Windows problems)
Seriously, though, I think it's funny that Microsoft needs to have a position like this. Maybe they'd be better off letting all employees spend 20% of their paid time reading about Linux and the most popular F/OSS programs out there. They might learn a thing or two (probably two) about how to code software that actually works. And then Microsoft wouldn't be throwing their money away.
There are a couple of of videos discussing Linux at Microsoft at Channel 9.
One of the points that Bill Hilf made in the interview on Channel9 is that Linux was "very different" from Windows. (He then added that either one, other, or both were "very different" from OSX.)
How true is this? I only ask because I have had some experience with MVS (the operating system which has no concept of "files" or "directories") and Tandem (whose weird features I can't remember enough to describe), and I would describe both of those as "very different" from UNIX or Windows.
When it comes down to it, UNIX and Windows look pretty similair to me. They both support WIMP GUIs. They both have concepts of files and directories. They both have users and groups and permissions. They both have preemptive multitasking and multithreading.
The whole reason that Hilf stated that "Linux is very different from Windows" was part of the justification as to why Microsoft would not build applications for Windows (which was transparent and deceitful). If my belief is correct (that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows), then my opinion of Hilf falls through the floor. Am I correct that Linux is "similar enough" to Windows?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
What would the world look like if MS figured out that they might be able to produce Linux apps, and have their Windows monopoly, too.
MS Desktop Environment. An X window manager, and the ONLY way to run MS Office and MS Visual Studio on Linux.
MS GUI for Samba. Runs in MS Desktop Environment. Opensource backend, closed source front end. Heck, if it runs on a proprietary MSDE, it could even be opensourced!
Same for IE. Maybe even an IIS than runs on Linux.
Weird thoughts. Not sure if they make business sense, or the traditionally sociopathic MS could think such thoughts.
I could see them doing it, and somehow managing to maintain a 'detente' with the open-source world. All-in-all, it might be a good thing for the market, and for consumers. You can get Windows (whatever edition), or you can get Linux, and run an interface on top of it that looks and acts like Windows.
Both will cost you $199. Both will run your MS apps. Pick and choose whatever you like.
Feels like an MS strategy to me, and you know what?
I can live with it. Just make sure it still uses some Opensource stuff as backends (CUPS, SANE, SAMBA), and I'll even buy it;
Especially if MS would use its immense market power to force Adobe and other top vendors to release their apps for the MSDE Linux environment.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Martin Taylor: Resistence is futile. You will be assimilated. ... Resistence is futile ... You will be ... Locutus?
Bill Hilf: I am a non-Microsoft guy working at Microso.f.. aaaaarrrrgggghhhhh
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I for one welcome our non-microsoft microsoft employee overlords!
they couldn't beat or break open source
so now they have to work with it
makes sense really -- for years they had no serious competition -- they still don't on the desktop
but the mac's recent resurgence on the desktop and the rise of linux and BSD on servers has to be dealt with -- how could microsoft not have an OSS and OS X lab?
shooting is not too good for my enemies
HILF = Highly Intelligent Life Form
...we gots to know! What are the MS Longhorn Devs fav linux distro?
This is important stuff here! heh
I think is really makes sense for them to employ a guy that knows how FOSS works, and I think he knows that and how FOSS is a threath to Microsoft.
From reading the article it looks to me like he is the guy running the department in Microsoft doing the real benchmarks on Microsoft products versus FOSS products. Not the flawed benchmarks we see, but the benchmarks that upper Microsoft management needs to see to know how they really compare to the only real competition they have left. The benchmarks where the same things are benchmarked and where both the compared products are fully optimized.
To what end?
I discussed and dismissed this possibility years ago. The problems with implementation are these:
My summary of this scenario, posted in 1998, read:
I don't see anything that's changed in 7 years (other than the lines in my face getting clearer....)
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
actually, he probably intentionally avoided another, better question : when will microsoft _really_ start doing something to increase interoperability instead of trying to make it as hard as possible for everybody else ?
stop using some half-assed closed crap (active-x), add support for opendocument, document native msoffic formats, smb etc - but that would make you compete on real benefits, not lock-in. oh no, we can't afford that.
Rich
I bet his wife is a milf.
I recently put my CV out to employment agencies. One agency person called me back to get more detailed information as to the types of employer I would and wouldn't work for. I said I would never work for Microsoft, no matter what job they offered or what salary they offered. The agency person actually said "You'll be surprised how many people say that."
Let's be under no illusions here - it's nothing to do with jealousy, more to do with personal pride.
Some things transcend monetary gain.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Great. Like I needed to hear this shit. Now I know where all the little ricer wannabe's come from... *grin*
I've never seen GNU appended to anything. I've seen GNU prepended to something, however.
But then, I've never seen an obsession even to prepend GNU to everything. I've never seen GNU/Windows, GNU/Solaris, GNU/Outlook Express, GNU/Internet explorer, GNU/Slashdot, GNU/Google, GNU/Amazon, GNU/DRM, GNU/DMCA, GNU/Patriot Act, GNU/Government, GNU/CIA, GNU/FBI, GNU/Bush,
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
we went out of business in 2001 - the etoys brand was sold on to kbtoys, who now run the site. fyi ;)
let me guess... a certain ticket reseller in LA? :-P