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The Competition for Developers
Ray Cromwell writes "Software competition a concern is a major concern, according to Steve Ballmer.
Amongst other things, Steve says
that the growing amount of development done for the Linux operating system by the work of volunteers developers worldwide is "scary."
Ballmer also characterized the free-form Linux community as "somewhat crazy," but said Microsoft now has "a real server competitor."
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It's funny that Microsoft wants us to believe that Linux and NT are the only real competitors in the server market. They're trying to defeat IBM, HP, and Sun (their real competitors in the high-end market) by excluding them from the contest.
The next step is to publish white papers like "Linux or Windows 2000, which is better for your enterprise?". Lets face it, neither Windows nor Linux is ready for seriously massive enterprise deployment today. But if MS can make it seem like these are the only choices they might take market share away from the companies that really have viable products.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
In a perfect world, Microsoft's approach to competition should be "bring it on!", but instead they continue to think of competition as a win-lose situation; someone can only succeed at others' expense. As long they respond to competitive threats with better code, then they might not disappear off the face of the earth once thier market share slips. I guess anything less than everything can only look like a loss when you've been ahead for so long.