Steve Ballmer: Get the Facts. I ‘love’ SQL Server on Linux
Nearly two decades after calling Linux a “cancer” Steve Ballmer has changed his stance, though he’s been careful not to back down or apologise over his pronouncements of the past.
Microsoft’s former CEO claimed he “loved” this week’s news that Redmond would deliver a Linux-compatible version of its ever-popular SQL Server database.
Ballmer is also reported to have described the threat posed to Windows as having already passed. Reportedly speaking at a dinner event this week, Ballmer described the threat to Windows from Linux as now “in the rearview mirror”.
According to Reuters, he said of Windows: “The company made a ton of money by fighting that battle very well… It’s been incredibly important to the company’s revenue stream.”
With $102bn in cash and Microsoft’s annual revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars, Microsoft certainly did fight that battle well and Ballmer therefore speaks from a position of relative authority.
What happened under Ballmer, however, was not a good, clean fight and as author of Microsoft’s anti-Linux campaign, it’s not surprising he’d stand by past actions.
It was under Ballmer that Microsoft’s relationship with the open-source and Linux community reached its nadir in the early 2000s, when Linux crossed from the nerd fringes to business mainstream. It was 2001 when the exuberant Ballmer called Linux a «cancer».
His beef was the General Public License (GPL) under which the Linux kernel is licensed, which Microsoft reckoned was a threat to all commercial makers of software. Ballmer then authorized a «Get the Facts» campaign of talking points and marketing against Linux that was branded as FUD by open-sourcers.
Get the Facts was an attempt to head off long-standing Windows server customers contemplating a switch to Linux on the server.
But Get the Facts could not alter the sea-change taking place, with vendors like Oracle putting their software on Linux and developers downloading Linux.
By 2005 Ballmer was shifting his position, presiding over a Visual Server 2005 Service Pack that managed Red Hat Linux. “It hurts my eyes,” Ballmer joked.
Microsoft also began working tactically with open source to make apps and code run on Windows Server – software such as PHP and MySQL.
Remarkably, he even made a bid to buy MySQL, offering $450m in January 2008 to take the popular database as its entry level relational product.
Then Sun stepped in and offered $1bn. Unsurprisingly, MySQL’s management took the Sun offer.
For all that, however, Microsoft under Ballmer remained a Windows-first firm – a move that compromised its commercial and technical dealings with Linux.
That is changing, now, under Ballmer’s successor Satya Nadella, with decisions such as SQL Server on Linux. SQL Server is traditionally one of Microsoft’s best-performing product lines. Putting it on Linux would have been unacceptable under Ballmer, custodian of a philosophy that the apps drive the platform sales.
That Ballmer defends the past is to be expected. That he should claim to love SQL Server on Linux is, in context, no surprise.
Alas, it was the former CEO’s past policy that has held back Microsoft – as it did in smartphones and tablets, too.
Whether SQL Server on Linux can work technically, whether it proves to be what the penguins had wanted, and whether it can unleash a new wave of growth – especially in a world of cloud – remains uncertain. ®
MS’ Ballmer: Linux is communism
MS Analysts 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.»
The rather unprepared Ballmer was a little more sensitive to the concerns of the financial analysts, and had chosen «Growth» as his title because there was clear concern that Microsoft might be running out of steam and be unable to generate sufficient revenue to satisfy Wall Street in the coming years. His message was essentially that Microsoft was «working very, very hard; very, very hard on new products». He said he would not give any percentages for growth, and said that the only dispute would be about «how quickly it will all come». All he saw was «upside». As to whether Microsoft would meet its targets, he couldn’t make any promises, «but there is certainly no downside risk in the consumer market. The amount of revenue that we may get all looks like upside to me versus where we are today. The same is largely true in small business.»
There was a hint that Ballmer was not overjoyed at the .NET caper, since he confessed «I have never felt better and I’ve never felt more nervous about something despite that fact in my career at Microsoft. When we launched .NET, frankly, I was saying, will they like it? Will the dog buy this dog food? Will it make sense to people?»
Ballmer was asked the classic teaser question: what he would have done differently. His great desire had been to have Windows 2000 ready for business and consumers at the same time. Apparently, Microsoft’s Japanese subsidiary didn’t agree that Windows 2000 was just a business product and as a result of its promotional efforts, had midnight queues when it was released, with Sony pre-loading it on consumer machines.
So Steve wishes he’d launched Win2k at the consumers as well as at business. But does he really? Win2k came under some fire for its initial lack of drivers, and it’s not stellar at running existing Windows games. So is Steve regretting first that Microsoft cancelled Neptune, and second that it didn’t finish Neptune and make it truly wonderful, or is he simply viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses? ®
«Linux — это рак». Microsoft признала ошибку прошлого в отношении open source
Главный юрисконсульт и президент Microsoft Брэд Смит (Brad Smith) признал, что прошлая позиция компании в отношении открытого программного обеспечения была в корне неверной.
В 2001 году скандально известный исполнительный директор Microsoft Стив Балмер (Steve Ballmer) заявил:
Linux — не общественное достояние. Linux — это рак, который пожирает всё чего касается в смысле интеллектуальной собственности. Так работает его лицензия».
Также Балмер сравнивал Linux с коммунизмом. Вскоре после этого сооснователь Microsoft Билл Гейтс (Bill Gates) назвал лицензию GPL (GNU General Public License) как «подобную Пакману» (Pac-Man-like). С тех пор позиция Microsoft изменилась. Даже Балмер признался в любви к Linux.
Теперь Смит признал во всеуслышанье, что данная позиция была исторически ошибочной, но, к сожалению, её придерживался и он сам. Смит отметил:
Microsoft исторически пошла по неверному пути, когда open source взорвал индустрию в начале века. Это я могу сказать и о себе».
Смит подчеркнул, что Microsoft сейчас является крупнейшим поставщиком проектов open source в мире, когда «дело доходит до бизнеса».
Сейчас Microsoft активно принимает участие в развитие открытых проектов. В 2018 году компания завершила покупку Github, крупнейшего сервиса хостинга IT-проектов и их совместной разработки. А на вчерашней презентации в рамках конференции Build 2020 компания Microsoft сообщила об улучшенной поддержке приложений для Linux c графическим интерфейсом: их можно будет запускать на Windows 10, причем с аппаратным ускорением GPU.
Стив Балмер изменил своё мнение о Linux
Будучи «у руля» корпорации Microsoft, Стив Балмер (Steve Ballmer) не слишком лестно отзывался об операционных системах на основе открытого исходного кода Linux, называя их раковой опухолью, которая поражает в плане интеллектуальной собственности всё, к чему прикасается. Теперь же экс-глава софтверного гиганта изменил своё мнение и в недавнем интервью журналу Tribune признался, что считает Linux серьёзным соперником Windows на рынке программных платформ для настольных ПК.
Он также похвалил нынешнее руководство некогда подвластной ему компании за его стремление к расширению взаимодействия с Linux-сообществом, имея в виду, конечно же, недавний анонс СУБД SQL Server для Linux. По словам Балмера, он даже направил гендиректору Microsoft Сатье Наделле (Satya Nadella) электронное письмо с поздравлением с данным решением. В то же время Балмер отметил, что Microsoft на отлично справилась с вызовом со стороны Linux, сохранив доминирующую позицию Windows на рынке ПК.
Напомним, что в настоящее время в Редмонде прикладывают все усилия к продвижению Windows 10. По данным Net Application, сейчас эта ОС установлена уже на более чем 14 % компьютеров, имеющих выход в Интернет. Таким образом, по числу пользователей «десятка» обошла Windows 8 и Windows 8.1 вместе взятые. Примерно такие же цифры называет и StatCounter, но при этом обе компании отмечают снижение темпов внедрения Windows 10. Если в январе рост её доли составлял более 2 %, то в феврале он едва превысил 1 % (1,1 % по версии Net Applications и 1,2 % согласно подсчётам StatCounter).