Sexy Jihad

Good Morning Silicon Valley has done an interview with Linus Torvalds on what he thinks of Microsoft and where he thinks it’s going:

Microsoft really is a fairly interesting vendor in this space. Unlike most proprietary vendors, it’s one of the very few ones whose bread and butter comes directly from its commodity market, and even its
specialized offerings often sell because of its near dominance of a market that certainly looks to be commoditized over the next decade or so.

So it’s no wonder that Microsoft is one of the very few players who really don’t seem to like open source. Most other vendors seem to see open source as a platform that they can ride on, while to MS it’s a threat to how they do business.

That said, I don’t see the MS market going away very fast, and I don’t see why MS couldn’t continue to function as a software company even if they don’t control the commodity market any more. In many ways I think MS is in the same situation that IBM was in two decades ago, losing control of the basic market — and thus the dominance of the market — but not necessarily going away or even necessarily shrinking.

I think the really interesting question is what happens to their profit margins. It’s almost all profit for them right now. I don’t think that’s sustainable in any market, and yes, I believe that open source is one of the things that will “correct” the software market.

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