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Microsoft Offers Linux Certification. Yes, Really. (dice.com)

Posted by timothy on from the first-comes-the-embrace dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: Former CEO Steve Ballmer once publicly referred to Linux as a 'cancer.' Not content to just let Ballmer blow up about it, company also spent a good deal of money and legal effort on claiming that open-source software violated its patents. A decade ago, the idea of Microsoft creating a Linux certification would have seemed like lunacy. But now that very thing has come to pass, (Dice link) with the Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure certification, designed in conjunction with the Linux Foundation. Earning the Linux on Azure certification requires tech pros to pass Microsoft Exam 70-533 (Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions) as well as the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) exam, which collectively require knowledge of Linux and Azure implementation. Microsoft evidently recognizes that open-source technology increasingly powers the cloud and mobile, and that it needs to play nice with the open-source community if it wants to survive and evolve.

13 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Not your father's Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They're seemingly doing everything right, expect for Windows 10 spying. Heck, even their HW is good now (Remember Zune, Ballmer's brainchild?)

    1. Re:Not your father's Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      To be fair, their peripherals were always top notch and the zune got way more flak than it deserved.

    2. Re:Not your father's Microsoft by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 3, Funny

      "They're seemingly doing everything right, expect for Windows 10 spying."

      That's like saying "my son is doing a great job living a life of good morals, ... except for those rapes".

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    3. Re:Not your father's Microsoft by Adriax · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, and that may be the forgotten lesson the new CEO is embracing. Even if you have really good, if not the best, of something in a sea of competition, if you try to force a monoculture you are going to drive people away.

      Windows didn't require a microsoft brand mouse in order to function and they still made a hefty profit on both hardware and software.
      But the times they did require a monocultire, like C#/.NET for most of its life, they found a lot of people just walked away and stuck to arguably inferior products.

      Just look at hololens, their big ball of holyshitthisisawesome. They have competition in the hardware department already, but they're helping asus instead of trying to block them. Now there's going to be two AR headsets running windows 10 instead of an all microsoft one and a competitor that would probably run a custom linux.

      --
      I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
  2. Untapped Market For MS by avandesande · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They could make a killing selling support for a Linux distribution . Lots of IT people are locked into Microsoft as a vendor and this would give them a good option.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
    1. Re:Untapped Market For MS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      I dunno why it irritates you. If you actually RTFA, you'd know the second component of the Linux on Azure cert is a Linux Foundation sysadmin certification, so it isn't just an Azure cert.

    2. Re:Untapped Market For MS by PCM2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      But if all you wanted was the Linux cert, you could just call the Linux Foundation and get that. So yes, it is really just an Azure cert bundled with (I assume) a discounted Linux Foundation cert.

      Makes sense. As I understand it, the vast majority of workloads on Azure are running Linux.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
  3. Year of the Linux desktop! by Spy+Handler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can imagine the day when Windows is built on top of Linux, similar to how MacOS is built on top of BSD. That will be the year of the Linux desktop!

    Maybe in 2020, Windows version 12.

  4. Maybe they will spin off the Windows division by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe Microsoft will one day spin-off the Windows division, so it becomes just another operating system that their cloud service supports. If they start writing their services to use .NET, then they could use Roslyn and .NET Core to make all their services portable. One could run IIS or Exchange on Linux. If it meant more sales for Azure, they could profit from it.

  5. Re:Would *you* trust a MS Linux certification? by ClickOnThis · · Score: 5, Funny

    Welcome to your first Microsoft Linux Certification class. Today we're going to learn about the command line.

    The first command we will try is

    sudo rm -rf /

    Please try it now.

    Good job. The course is over. You are now all Certified.

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  6. Just got my MS BCCT by sinij · · Score: 3, Funny

    I just got my MS BCCT (Balmer-certified chair thrower) certification. Who wants to hire me?

  7. Increasingly? by DeathElk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Increasingly? INCREASINGLY?? Open source isn't "increasingly" powering Internet services, IT'S BEEN THE BENCHMARK SINCE DARPA. FFS, Microsoft was the cancer, trying to force proprietary standards down everyones throat.

  8. Not a good day to Zune by dbIII · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most days yes, but on that one day a year on a leap year it's the classic example of an utterly stupid newbie mistake that would have failed a high school programming assignment in 1985.
    Files with an expiry date beyond which the music would not play meant it needed to know the date so a calendar was thrown in as an afterthought without even the most simple tests being applied - so on the last day of leap year the Zune would not work at all. A failure so epic that it is one for the textbooks and will be remembered long after anything else about the Zune.