“Ballmer went on to claim that IBM can’t make money with Linux,
except through services business that would compete with IBM
partners: ‘They make no money on software; they make no money on
hardware. They make money only in services.’“While Ballmer may be good at pacing on stage and rallying the
pro-Microsoft troops, he might garner a bit more credibility with
the broader industry if he employed facts. developerWorks has
learned that ‘IBM drove nearly $100 million of eServer and
Middleware direct sales transactions from Linux from IBM’s top 400
Linux partners–with over a third in SMB.’ This was in the first
half of 2004 alone. And it does not include services…”