Enterprise: Opinions

With the first public alpha release of Windows 7 due Monday at the Microsoft PDC2008 conference, the outline of the new operating system is taking shape. What you won't see when that alpha comes out is the way that Microsoft will try to use Windows 7 as a Trojan horse in its war against Google.

Quiz time. Get out your No. 2 computers and answer the following question: For the fastest and most reliable high-end computing for your enterprise, will your operating system be 1) Linux, 2) Solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?

T-Mobile, HTC and Google launched the "world's first Android-powered mobile phone" today and proudly announced that this phone was going to be "game-changing". But after reading details on the phone, the service and some of the new applications, I'm left wondering where the game is actually changing.

Service-oriented architectures are helping companies do everything from automate business processes to increase agility, but implementing the technology is not necessarily forthright.

I'm not above engaging in a little shameless name-dropping, especially when I know the dropped name will spark a reaction. So while chatting with attendees at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last week, I made no secret of the fact that I had interviewed Richard Stallman a few days earlier. I marveled at the awe and admiration on the faces of many of my listeners.

At this point in the game, Microsoft should really come clean with a statement that rescinds its Linux/patent/suing threat altogether. Granted, Microsoft put itself in a hard spot with this one, since it had its channel singing the same tune for those murky months after the threat. If it stands up says, "Sorry, just kidding!" that won't make the channel partners happy, particularly if they used the threat to convince customers they must buy SUSE or Windows over Red Hat and other distros. But the fact is, we are seeing actions by Microsoft that indicate that the "suing Linux users" jig is up.

If you missed the recent news it appears that Google has gone, in effect, head to head with Wikipedia, but with differences.

Zimbra has long been one of my favorite open source products. I remember getting a first demo of Zimbra from CEO Satish Dharmaraj at the Red Hat conference about three years ago, while they were still in stealth mode. Satish, Scott Dietzen and the rest of the crew weren't setting out to build a me-too mail client. They were attacking a much larger problem.

Have you ever experienced a software bug and thought to yourself, "I could fix that"? If you could, would you? How could that even be possible?

Google went from startup to behemoth in record time. But there are increasing signs that Google has become just another fat, happy, and even arrogant company, no longer the lean, industry-changing giant of the past. And that spells good news for Microsoft.

Recession be damned. The first quarter of the year saw a record $203.7 million of venture capital flow to young open source companies. You'd think that would be a cause for celebration, but for too many members of the open source community money is, well, icky.