MS's Hilf Named Windows Server Marketer

netbuzz writes "The director of Microsoft's Open Source Lab, Bill Hilf, has added a new duty — general manager of Windows server marketing — to his already established role of shepherding the company's efforts to have open source software peacefully coexist with Microsoft technologies. What the company calls a 'natural evolution' of Hilf's job description may not be considered quite so natural among segments of the open source community that eye every Microsoft move with suspicion if not hostility." Bill Hilf answered Slashdot's questions two years back and sounded quite friendly to OSS; yet at other times he has come off like a hardcore Microsoftie.

Comments

Re:acronyms

[CoreDump01]

Worst topic ever.

Re:What's with all the fud?

[normal_guy]

Good thing the summary and article are about server software, which has nothing to do with Ogg or various compression formats. Any serious lifting of Ogg or Zip/tar on either server platform will need some serious custom development regardless of what's built-in. Some post up the thread hit the nail on the head.

To implement a Kerberos/ldap/sso system of even a fraction of Active Directory's complexity is prohibitively expensive on Linux, at least in my enterprise experience.

Re:If at first you don't succeed ...

[tomhudson]

Oh, I agree 100% his job is to just spin the FUD. That Microsoft had to resort to Hilf shows how lacking in insight they are. They could have gotten better spinmeisters here, just by running the anti-microsoft stuff through a script with a few regexes.

They're trying to cover their bases, but its more like a retreat than anything else, because when you have a virtual monopoly, you're your own worst competitor. the person you're trying to steal sales from is yourself - youhave to convince customers that the "wonderful stuff" they bought a few years ago is now "a piece of outdated crap".

That gets predictable, boring, and starts corroding trust. After a while, you ARE your own worst enemy, and people WANT to see you fail. The rest, as they say, is history. We're seeing it now with Vista. Despite Microsofts' claims, Vienna (the next OS after Vista) will be even worse. They either have to break compatibility with the past (in which case, users have little no reason to stick with Microsoft) or just do "more of the same", on an increasingly untenable code base.

This is a rear-guard action, but you can stick a fork in Microsofts' business model. It might not be done yet, but its getting close.