http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2042
audio here: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/z/e/200510/ballmergartner.mp3
Quoth Balmer (around 29:25 in the mp3):
"The day I come in front of the Gartner audience and say we have a
better Unix than Linux, that'll be a good day, we're not quite
there yet."
WTF, over?
Did Balmer just say in front of a bunch of Gartner goons that they're
going Unix in order to defeat linux?
And if its *really* "Unix", which one?
FreeBSD?
Does MSFT buy Apple? (Naw, there would be all kinds of anti-
competitive claims. Dept of Commerce would never let that deal go
through.)
Sun?
Softway Systems? No, they already bought them - and incorporated
Interix into Windows.
SCO?
Perhaps this is why MS has been feeling around for ways to
monopolize Unix (SCO lawsuits) or at least throw their competitors
off-balance, particularly the Linux juggernaut. Maybe MS will just
finish buying out SCO but I don't think SCO's unix is acceptable as a
market-dominator (hasn't been so far for SCO.)
Maybe this is why we're hearing less about the SCO lawsuits, or maybe
this is BECAUSE the SCO lawsuits have fizzled and so this is Plan B.
Or maybe the lawsuits were an attempt to explore wiping out
competition for an MS/Unix. Or maybe they'd just pick up SCO's IP and
fork a different Unix. Or maybe mentioning SCO is a total red herring
on my part.
Or maybe this is just a continuation of the old "a better UNIX than
UNIX" claim Microsoft made about NT a while back, where I guess the
first occurrence of "UNIX" meant "an OS that can support the same
kind of applications UNIX can, even if it doesn't do so by offering
UNIX APIs directly" (although with Interix's UN*X subsystem replacing
the old "contractual obligation POSIX subsystem" from NT, maybe they
*can* offer them directly and make it easier to just run those apps
on Windows;
Then again maybe it's not true and Ballmer is either totally
confused: Unix as synonym for OS or Server OS or he just means his
better OS
than Unix, MORE UNIX THAN UNIX ITSELF! We've OUT-UNIX'ed UNIX!
Or he's referring to some kind of POSIX API on Windows having deluded
himself much in the same way an American car manufacturer might
imagine they're having their lunch eaten by foreigners because the
competition produces more red cars. Yeah, that must be it...forget
reliability and stability and security and non-insane allocation of
hardware and software resources...it must be that pesky open() call
which is sending MS to its doom. Unix becomes a cargo cult at
Redmond...film at 11.
I'm waiting for the day when they fully implement eniW and support
running, say, Linux - or Solaris x86, or... - binaries on Windows).
Steve-o also emphatically claims to have "never thrown a chair",
(around 2:50) too.
jim
p.s. Someone should tell that bloggernaut it's "row to hoe", unless
perhaps you work in a caviar factory.
