Microsoft's new foes
For as long as anyone can remember Microsoft and open source software have been pitted against one another. The one a highly profitable software company, the other a collection of software that was hard to pin down but has been highly disruptive to traditional proprietary software.
But now, instead of Red Hat, MySQL, Ubuntu and others keeping Steve Ballmer awake at night, the company has a set of new foes: Google, cloud computing and virtualisation.
At this week’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Summit the company made this clear with an agenda that included topics on competing with VMWare and standing up to Google’s Apps.
In one of the keynote addresses chief operating officer Kevin Turner said: “Don’t let customers get Googled. They’re coming after us. Guns a blazing. They’ve won customers.” But, said Turner, many customers had tried Google’s Apps and had returned to Microsoft. “We don’t want some of them, we want all the customers to experience the best of breed applications.”
Turner also jibed at Google’s motto of not being evil. “We don’t read your email and invade your privacy. We’re not snooping your WiFi. That’s not what we’re about. We don’t have a mission statement that reminds us not to do evil,” he said.
Turner also hit out at VMWare, mocking its pricing structure and saying “We’re cross-platform. We run VMware. They’re not cross-platform.” Microsoft’s own Hyper-V technology is the issue here.
To achieve its domination of the cloud computing space Microsoft needs to make sure Hyper-V becomes dominant in the sector. With a powerful VMWare (or alternative virtualisation technology) in the cloud arena, Microsoft would be in a weaker position to advance its applications.
The other major threat to Microsoft is its lacklustre mobile strategy. On this Turner admitted the weakness but said that Microsoft was ready to come back.
Offering a real hint of when Windows Phone 7 would be released he said: “In the October time frame we’re back in this game and this game is not over.”
Obviously Linux and open source software in general remain a threat for Microsoft but judging by the rhetoric at the Worldwide Partner Conference it is no longer threat number one. Cloud computing is the new frontier and in that space whoever owns the platform controls the applications.
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