By Graeme Wearden, 22 April 2004 08:45
NEWS Microsoft has popped up at a Linux conference in London to fight its corner and encourage Linux developers and vendors to battle for the desktop market
The increasing take-up of open source on the desktop will drive Microsoft to create better products in response, the software giant said on Wednesday.
Bradley Tipp, Microsoft's national system engineer, told the Linux User and Developer conference in London that competition was good for the whole software industry and would lead to better products emerging from Redmond.
"The thing I like is that Microsoft does its best work and is most innovative when it has competition, so bring it on," said Tipp.
Tipp's comments echoed the view expressed on Tuesday by Matt Asay, director of Linux business office at Novell, when he claimed the lack of alternative desktop operating systems had given Microsoft little incentive to improve its software range.
Tipp appeared as part of a debate at the conference, where a number of players in the open-source scene, including Asay, gave their view on the future of Linux on the desktop.
Asay told the event that Linux's penetration into the desktop market mirrored the progress it made in the server space three or four years ago.
"There's probably not real competition on the desktop today," said Asay. "In a year, or two years, we'll see frantic competition."
Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
There are 11 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
The Last thing Microsoft have is innovation: Window, Icon, Mouse, PulldownMenu (Xerox/Macintosh), the "good" thing about Microsoft is they bought everything: Visio, VirtualPC, and even Lindows Name :)
2. anonymous
"Microsoft does its best work and is most innovative when it has competition..."
...usually this involves destroying the companies who exhibit creative innovation or buying the companies and rebranding their products as Microsoft.
Can anyone name an innovative Microsoft product? I remember this question giving the head of R&D at Microsoft some difficulty, when posed by a BBC interviewer, a few years ago.
He eventually settled for Cleartype - which was actually a technique for rendering fonts pioneered by Apple engineers years earlier.
3. anonymous
Window, pull down menu = ease of use.. a sensible approach to computing if you ask me ~:) microsoft is incredible.. thats why it can buy everything, imo of course.
4. Roger Ash
Ironic to here an MS employee embracing the idea of competition! If MS thinks it's such a good thing, why does it fight tooth and nail against antitrust cases brought against it? It should welcome them and rush to implement the suggested solutions!
5. anonymous
Microsoft bought everything saya anonymous of Jakarta. But the list does not go back far enough. The whole Microsoft empire was built on licencing MSDOS. DOS was bought for a trivial sum, renamed and IBM made it universal by licencing it for their PCs. The innovation by Bill Gates was to buy and licence not create.
6. Mark Solomon
Yes, that's why it spends so much time trying to crush its competition using illegal methods.
7. anonymous
Remove the little boot anim from XP and you get a linux "boot up script".
MS rip all the good stuff out there and give credits too no one.
8. anonymous
Sounds to me like MS are trying to divert developer effort from other areas where they may be vulnerable.
9. Pete Scott
So if Microsoft does it's best and most innovative work when it has competition, does that mean that the lack of competition prior to the rise of Linux resulted in poor prodicts displaying little in the way of innovation?
10. anonymous
Microsoft's idea of "innovation" is, acquisition. And if you don't sell your company, then MS will outright steal your idea and integrate it into Windows. If you sue them on copyright claims, they will just tie you up in the courts for years while your profits dwindle to nothing forcing you to drop your products that has now been integrated into Windows.
Microsoft does not complete. They embrace, extend and then extinguish. It's about leveraging you OUT of the market. MS never competed head-to-head.
Linux will FORCE them to compete for the first time! Heh heh...
11. anonymous
The lack of innovation is certainly true; quite a lot of the source code for NT wasn't actually written by them.
And the names of their products aren't exactly imaginative either: "Windows 3.1", "Windows 95", "Windows 98", "Windows 2000", "Windows XP", "SQL Server"...
Question: How did Microsoft, who have no Linux presence at ALL, manage to get into the Linux conference? Why weren't they lynched by the open-sourcers?