April 25, 2003
Ballmer Says Linux Is "Cancer"
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, once again on an anti-open source crusade, now says that Linux is a "cancer" but that the new Windows Server 2003 product can compete with free software because is it "innovative." [CNET.com]
Innovation is not something that is easy to do in the kind of distributed environment that the open-source/Linux world works in. I would argue that our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that community. . . . Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition.
All this from the company that brought us a desktop GUI in 2000 that Apple made available in 1987, that specializes in buying technology developed elsewhere (DOS, PowerPoint, IE, etc.) and that still cannot fugure out how to put a laptop computer to sleep. Eat your Cheerios, Steve, you're going to need them. All you have is monopoly power; in the long-run, that's not enough to save the company.
Posted by glenn
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