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Posts in 2008 February 01
Microsoft's Terrible Open-Source Strategy
Even Microsoft has realized that open-source cannot be ignored. For years, Microsoft’s open-source strategy has basically been to destroy or ignore open-source software, and it seems like they have not gotten much smarter. Microsoft’s “Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company’s Open Source Software Lab” recently explained the company’s open-source strategy to ZDNet. If this is really the strategy Microsoft intends to follow, it is almost comical.
As far as I can tell, the theory is this: let open-source people port their applications to Windows and hand them a piece of rope so they can tie themselves to all of Microsoft’s proprietary products and cannot leave. (And if you need Linux, use Microsoft’s virtualization technology to run it on Windows.) As you can see, this is not going to work.
Perhaps this strategy would work if Microsoft had an absolute monopoly on the OS market, but if that is what they are thinking, I have bad news for them, once they catch up to the 21st century.
If anyone can figure out what Microsoft is thinking, please let me know. I sure can’t figure it out. Unless.. I know! This is how Balmer will make everyone port their applications to Windows!
Investors disapprove of the Microsoft – Yahoo combination
There’s been a lot of talk today about Microsoft’s effort to acquire Yahoo and what a successful takeover might mean for various open source software work with which Yahoo is associated. I’m not sure what to make of all that, but I am struck by the fact investors seem to think that a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo will make the combined company worth about $8 billion less than the sum of the values of the separate companies. How did I get this number? Well, the merger became public information before the stock market opened this morning. At the end of today’s trading, Microsoft’s stock price had fallen by $2.15 per share, while Yahoo’s stock price had risen by $9.20 per share. Multiplying these share price changes by the number of shares for each respective company, the implied value of Microsoft was reduced by $20 billion, while that of Yahoo was increased by only $12 billion. Investors, at least, are betting that Microsoft cannot successfully integrate Yahoo’s business into its own, and that the takeover will effectively waste $8 billion.