I was reading an article about Bill Hilf, Microsoft's Linux Lab manager, when several things struck me as strange. First off Bill Hilf was hired in January 2004 from IBM. Before that Microsoft had no Linux lab. I find this remarkably telling. For years MS has been waging a FUD war on Linux yet apparently had blinded itself in the process. They assumed their initial FUD would be stop Linux in it's tracks and a deeper understanding of linux and open source wouldn't be necessary. So they didn't even bother setting up a lab to see why their customers were using Linux.
Another telling quote from the CIO of Microsoft,
"As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft," Microsoft CIO Ron Markezich said in a December interview with CNET News.com. "My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world. It's an easy choice for me, in that sense, to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle. We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server."
No offense but if you don't run your competing products, how on earth are you going to make your products the best in the world? If you don't know what your competition is doing, how can you make a strong case that your product is better. The Oracle example is quite telling. Oracle is the leader in databases. If I were a CIO thinking about moving my mission critical application to SQL Server, I would want more confidence that Microsoft is a superior product (just a equal product means why would you switch?)
It seems to me that INTENTIONALLY blinding yourself because it wasn't built here is a particularly poor strategy, especially in an environment where you are selling the superiority of your products over the competition.
Part of the problem is the MS philosophy of eating your own dog food. Through the use of the product internally, you can drive improvement of that product. There is however downside to that approach, namely you blind yourself to the potential advantages that your competitors may have.
Technorati Tags:
Open Source
Linux
Microsoft
