[ Thanks to J.
Stafford for this link. ]
“Peter Houston, senior director of the Windows platform, is
a six-year Microsoft veteran and server strategist who keeps an eye
on how customers are using their servers, regardless of their
choice of platform. He then helps them set a corporate server
strategy. The time has come, he says, for Microsoft to stop taking
swipes at the Linux community and offer up a pragmatic business
defense.“By taking a less combative stance against Linux, does
this mean that Microsoft acknowledges that networks won’t be ‘all
Microsoft’? Could Microsoft be embracing Linux?“Peter Houston: We certainly don’t want to be
viewed as putting up barriers in the Linux community. Microsoft is
still going to invest in delivering Microsoft extensions of the
platform. We don’t see doing Linux versions of things. But with the
work we’ve done around open protocols, on XML protocols and with
SOAP, there has been a huge focus on keeping open at the interface
and Web services layer. Behind that is the implementation, and we
want to compete on implementation. You can’t differentiate your
offering at the protocol level. What’s behind that–the management
infrastructure, security, execution, transaction
processing–there’s where you’ve got to be better…”