Microsoft Does Linux

I had to check the date on the arti­cle when I saw the announce­ment that Microsoft was going to pro­vide some level of sup­port for Linux. How­ever, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke; it’s the real thing and has seri­ous implications.

In order to under­stand the impact, one has to under­stand how Microsoft used to work. In the past, Microsoft was all about pro­tect­ing two key plat­forms: Microsoft Win­dows and Microsoft Office. As both tools rep­re­sent the bread mak­ers of the com­pany, ensur­ing strong rev­enue while they try to go after mar­kets, the Red­mond giant was loath to do any­thing that could poten­tially help com­peti­tors in any way. As a result, they closely pro­tected their own ecosys­tem and worked hard on spread­ing a mes­sage that essen­tially said that using other oper­at­ing sys­tem was bad for your busi­ness.

With this announce­ment, we may see a new Microsoft: one that is open to the real­i­ties of the mar­ket­place. Linux is not going away and Microsoft knows it so, instead of try­ing to fight it head on, the com­pany has decided to take its embrace and extend atti­tude and wrap its arms around the oper­at­ing system.

This is both a bless­ing and a poten­tial threat to Linux ven­dors. Com­put­ing his­tory shows that when Microsoft embraces a com­peti­tor, that com­peti­tor may need to start rethink­ing its strategy.

The first step, beyond announc­ing sup­port for Linux, is cre­at­ing a team focused on Linux. From their announce­ment:

Microsoft is com­mit­ted to pro­vid­ing a pos­i­tive cus­tomer expe­ri­ence when run­ning sup­ported Linux oper­at­ing sys­tems as guests in Vir­tual Server 2005 R2. There­fore, the prod­uct sup­port model for these con­fig­u­ra­tions will be con­sis­tent with exist­ing cus­tomer sup­port for Vir­tual Server prod­ucts. Cus­tomers who report inter­op­er­abil­ity issues with Linux guests or vir­tual machine add-ins will be routed to a team that is spe­cially trained to trou­bleshoot issues related to Linux guests within Vir­tual Server 2005 R2.

What we are see­ing here is noth­ing short of a major rev­o­lu­tion at Microsoft. By hav­ing some peo­ple fully ded­i­cated to sup­port­ing Linux, the com­pany will gain a deep com­pet­i­tive knowl­edge of what works and what doesn’t with Linux servers.

As a result of that acknowl­edg­ment, Win­dows is now going to evolve to bet­ter counter the threat of Linux. While Red­mond was large in denial as to the power of Linux, the mes­sage is now that they are tak­ing it heads on, using code instead of rhetoric to fight it.

Linux fans may be rejoic­ing at the news but I would take a more care­ful approach and say beware. In 1997, Microsoft care­fully embraced Java. What fol­lowed was the quick death of Java as a front end tech­nol­ogy, forc­ing Sun to repo­si­tion it as a back-end cod­ing tech­nol­ogy. While Java has thrived, Sun was forced to repo­si­tion it in order to make it thrive. Few Win­dows pro­gram­mers switched to Java and Microsoft man­aged to pro­tect its own invest­ment in Visual Basic, build­ing a lot of Java-like func­tion­al­ity in its devel­op­ment tools and then intro­duc­ing tools that could stay com­pet­i­tive while inte­grat­ing with Win­dows, thus pro­tect­ing the Microsoft ecosystem.

The ques­tion that Linux devel­op­ers will have to ask them­selves is where the ben­e­fits of this Microsoft embrace lie. While it may look like a capit­u­la­tion, it may just be a strate­gic shift in their offen­sive. By gain­ing a deeper under­stand­ing of the value of Linux (and, if you look at the ver­sions of Linux they are sup­port­ing, price is not really the com­pet­i­tive threat they are try­ing to counter but fea­tures seem to be as all the sup­ported prod­ucts are paid ones) and build­ing it in their future offerings.

It’s going to be inter­est­ing to see how this rela­tion­ship evolves. I see two poten­tially dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios com­ing out of this:

• Microsoft increases its embrace of Linux and is gen­uinely inter­ested in being more open, thus allow­ing them to sell prod­ucts that work in a more mixed envi­ron­ment, which would help them get into areas in which they are weak, thus increas­ing poten­tial sell of the new “good cit­i­zen” Win­dows ver­sion. This could stem from Microsoft’s real­iza­tion that their biggest com­pet­i­tive threat is not com­ing from the out­side but from the inside: exist­ing ver­sions of Win­dows may be good enough for most peo­ple so, to ensure upgrades to future ver­sion, Microsoft needs to evolve the mar­ket to an area where they play well with others.
• The other, darker, sce­nario, would be one where Microsoft embraces and extends Linux in the future. It would first dis­cover what makes Linux a bet­ter sell than Win­dows and incor­po­rate Linux-like func­tion­al­ity in their OS, thus reduc­ing the poten­tial threat. Once it matches fea­tures, the com­pany would then present all the advan­tages of Win­dows in terms of installed base and use that as lever­age to impede the growth of Linux.

I don’t yet know which of these sce­nar­ios the com­pany will fol­low but it will be inter­est­ing to see how this devel­ops. I hope that the first one, with Microsoft being gen­uine in its acknowl­edg­ment of new real­i­ties and becom­ing more open, is what they are shoot­ing for but past his­tory has told another story. Only time will tell whether they can truly move for­ward and become a more open com­pany and if that hap­pens, this moment will be seen as a his­tor­i­cal shift not only in Microsoft his­tory but in com­put­ing his­tory as a whole.