07.18.08
Microsoft: Our Biggest Competitors in SMB Space Are OpenOffice.org, MysQL
“It’s nice for you to admit your guys are running scared [of Free software]. They should be.”
According to Groklaw, NATO has just adopted ODF as a mandatory standard. Pamela Jones adds: “No, I don’t see OOXML on the list. On this page, NATO explains the need for standards…”
More interesting, however, is the following job vacancy at Microsoft. [via]
Our passion is helping our field and partners win against our biggest competitors in this space, particularly OpenOffice and MySQL.
So there you have the explicit admission that OpenOffice.org is a “biggest competitor” to Microsoft Office and MySQL is a “biggest competitor” to Microsoft SQL Server. All in all, they are also “biggest competitor[s]” to Microsoft’s core business as a whole.
“All in all, they are also “biggest competitor[s]” to Microsoft’s core business as a whole.”Microsoft’s offerings are overpriced and they do not support standards (data is not easily portable, i.e. lock-in prevails). Microsoft needs people to persuade businesses to look away from Free software. Sounds familiar? It ought to (more here).
As explained previously, Microsoft prefers stepping over to rival territories. It’s seemingly doable when rivalry reaches only a minority and OpenLogic provides data such as location of business 'threats'.
We gave an example of this yesterday. Remember what happened to XenSource after Microsoft had intervened. Here is where things stand today.
Tony Asaro, who recently joined Virtual Iron as Chief Strategy Officer, pointed out that the Xen technology is also the result of the efforts of others, therefore the results are not owned by Citrix.
Acquiring a virtualization company is easy, especially if you can pay an high price for it, retaining its community maybe a more difficult task, though.
Dissipation of a community is a nasty and anti-social strategy, but it’s not the only one in Microsoft’s books.
A strategy of approaching the feeble on verge of defecting will prevail as long as the whack-a-mole methodology is ’scalable’. But software of this kind (GPL) explodes in popularity, so Microsoft’s plan is hardly maintainable. MySQL is downloaded about 70,000 times per day and OpenOffice.org is reportedly downloaded, on average, 1.2 million times per week.
For those who do not keep track of the market, in today’s trading Microsoft’s shares are already down approximately 8%. In its previous quarter, Microsoft admitted that sales of Windows and Office had declined by as much as 24%. yesterday it reported other problems. It fails to evolve and Yahoo! may have just escaped its claws for good. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.