On Thursday 24 June 2004 14:23, Jenny Hopkins wrote:
Seen this? http://www.microsoft.com/uk/2020
Jen
If Microsoft are willing to spend this much money running a tour like this and employing the services of their "independent" experts. Then it simply confirms what most of us in the Open Source community have known for ages.
Linux is a very real threat to Microsoft's business model. At the moment Microsoft are in a very vulnerable position as to loosing marketshare.
The next major revision of their desktop OS is not due until sometime in 2006. The last major revision had a lukewarm reception and a very slow takeup in the business world. I know it's early days, but I've played with Longhorn beta's and so far it looks like XP with even more fluff. The only really interesting thing to me was the Database Filesystem and I am hearing rumours that is off the feature list now.
Office has gone as far as it can (IMO) Open Source solutions are catching up.
Most of the buzz in the industry at the moment is around HPC Clusters, In my view Microsoft have no viable platform for this at the moment.
Lets face it, despite all the "Trustworthy" FUD spread last year, so far this year MS have had a pretty poor show regarding discovered flaws, broken patches and several nasty worms/viruses.
Next time any of us meet resistance trying to deploy Open Source solutions in the workplace, we should point to this tour and say "If the biggest software company in the world is taking open source seriously, shouldn't we at least consider it as an option ?"