White paper: Managing social networking with Microsoft Office Sh. Choice, anyone? Microsoft & Novell, Windows. Microsoft and Novell announced a broad collaborative effort that puts customers first. It includes a set of three agreements: broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market, and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together for customers, and a patent agreement that provides each company’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. Customer demand coupled with common business interests between Microsoft and Novell made this deal happen. This agreement comes on the heels of Oracle announcing worldwide customer support services for RedHat Linux.
The Linux world now has the attention of the largest software companies because their customers are using it, and it makes good business sense to support it. Customers have been using Linux and Windows for years, but typically on separate servers, and for very different tasks. Microsoft has reached out to the Linux world and Open Software community. Tecosystems » Apache and Microsoft: Incremental or Revolutionary. “Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.” – Sam Ramji, Microsoft When Microsoft kindly made me aware of this news in advance during a sit down meeting at OSCON earlier this week, they seemed more than a bit disappointed with my reaction to the news. To the extent that they used words like “sloppy” to describe it and phrases like “hipster perpetual boredom” my attitude. Not, presumably, because I believed it to be a bad move, because I did not and do not.
More likely it was due to the fact that I was less enthusiastic than they might have hoped. Which is understandable, given the context. To explore that context and more, let’s turn to our old friend, the Q&A. Q: To begin with, anything to disclose? Q: Now, what do you mean, precisely, that the reactions to this are understandable in context? Q: Why is that? Microsoft: My way or the highway with SOA? Ed Scannell and Chris Kanaracus of Redmond Magazine just published a cover story entitled "Microsoft Does Have an SOA Strategy," which nicely outlines Big Red's strategy for moving its product lines into the SOA world. The lead says it all: "Microsoft has never been inclined to play by the rules. For the past 32 years, the company has maintained the cocky pose of its legendary founder, Bill Gates, aggressively challenging entrenched technology standards -- even some its own customer base wants to see flourish side by side with Windows.
" Microsoft isn't changing its tune with SOA, the authors say, noting that "Microsoft again appears to be crafting its own rules and vision. The company has so far declined to participate in certain key emerging industry standards relevant to SOA. It has a different perspective on what SOA is and a different approach for crystallizing its vision. " A couple of thoughts here.