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.”

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.