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Microsoft May Be Targeting the Ubuntu Desktop
mjasay writes "Microsoft is advertising for a new director of open source strategy, but this one has a specific purpose: fight the Linux desktop. 'The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft's global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.' For a variety of reasons, this move is almost certainly targeted at Ubuntu Linux's desktop success. With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
Reader christian.einfeldt notes Microsoft's acknowledgment of the FOSS threat to their business model within SEC filings, and suggests that this job posting could instead be about maintaining Internet Explorer's market share lead against Firefox.
After TWENTY FIVE years of effort.
2009-1992 = 17
m/(ba|c|tc|k)?sh/
Facebook is the new AOL
"f you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS."
There's a lot of truth in this, but just the same, for the vast majority of organizations it's the content of those documents which is really important, not the exact layout (think about how quickly in real terms most large organizations managed to transform all those business-essential forms and documents from paper to electronic form - less than a decade for most - and that was a much more costly transition in terms of the human hours involved than merely reformatting some .doc-formatted files).
My suspicion is in years to come there's going to be a lot of demand for tools like the (open source) Australian government-funded Xena, an "XML Normalizing tool" for converting almost any digital document format you care to name to an open XML format for archiving and re-use.