The Register: MS' Ballmer: Linux is communism Jul 31, 2000, 11 :14 UTC (63 Talkback[s]) (19696 reads) (Other stories by Graham Lea)
"Steve Ballmer was the only person to raise the issue of Linux when
he wrapped up Microsoft's annual financial analysts meeting in
Seattle, although he put Sun and Oracle ahead in terms of being
stronger competitors. They of course are 'civilised' competitors - but
the Linux crowd, in the world of Prez Steve, are communists."
"Ballmer wanted "to emphasise the competitive threat, and in some
senses the competitive opportunity, that Linux represents. Linux is a
tough competitor. There's no company called Linux, there's barely a
Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth.
And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people
love so very, very much about it. That is, it's free. [Outlook Express is
free, and also sometimes lets strangers share your hard disk - is this
anarchism? - Ed] And I'm not trying to make fun of it, because it's a
real competitive issue. Today, I would say, we still don't see a lot of
Linux competition in most quarters on the desktop, and we see a lot
of Linux competition in some server markets. And we could either
say, hey, Linux is going to roll over the world, but I don't see that
happening. That's not what's going on right now."
"Ballmer though Microsoft should "go back into some of the ISP
markets and ASP markets where Linux has been historically strong
and start to compete more successfully. Not on price, not on the free
nature of our stuff, but as we get better development tools, as we
make it easier for people to debug their software, as we have sort of
a development approach that facilitates the applications that ISPs
have been writing, I think we have a real opportunity to, if you will,
push back into some of the markets that have been real Linux
strongholds. But Linux has too, with its free price point, and the fact
that it runs on the same hardware we do, so we have no hardware
advantage versus Linux, which we do tend to have with some of our
other competitors, it certainly is something very, very much on our
radar screen."
