On Nov 2, 2006, at 11:03 PM, Levi Pearson wrote:
You must be looking at this through some weird, distorted Free
Software glasses or something. Clearly Open Document is Betamax
and Microsoft's new Open XML standard is VHS. Betamax vs. VHS was
all about market share, and in the real world, Microsoft is still
king there.
And whatever happened to variety and choice being good? Or is that
only true when Microsoft isn't creating the variety?
I'll have to agree with Levi here. While I prefer not to have
Windows, I work for a small division of a large company that is
predominantly Microsoft. The division I work for runs all Linux,
desktop and all. The larger company doesn't know what to do with us
- they have to allow us to use Linux because that is what we develop
on, but they have no way of managing those Linux machines with the
Microsoft systems they manage the network with. With Microsoft
working with Novell to provide ActiveDirectory, sales support
directly from Microsoft for Linux that can go right along side the
Windows licenses my company buys, and even rumors of MS Office to be
released for Linux (with ActiveDirectory integration, I can easily
see an MS Outlook for Linux), my division now has a way to integrate
with the rest of the company. I think the larger company will have
an easier and cheaper way to transition to using Linux in other ways
as well. I feel while I'm sure MS is giving up some desktop share
for this move, they are still gaining in the MS Office realm, and
allowing more MS servers to be bought due to one strength they do
have which is ActiveDirectory. However, I feel this really benefits
Linux, perhaps even more in that it will allow large companies to
better integrate with Linux on the desktop. If anything, Linux may
finally have an edge on the desktop.
Jesse
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