Martin Taylor talks about his first year as Microsoft's
chief Linux strategist.
What are some of the lessons you learned?
A year ago, we had a pretty direct strategy. We really [wanted]
to dial down the emotion, dial down the rhetoric, have a more
fact-oriented approach and dial up the pragmatic analysis of
solutions.
I initially thought that people were really lining up Windows
and Linux side by side, and they'd say, "Hey, Linux gives us better
TCO [total cost of ownership]."
Actually, it's less about that. What they know is, "Hey, we can
save money getting off Unix or Risc." So the question is, "Do we go
to Linux or do we go to Windows?" That's where more of the
comparison comes from.
Any other surprises?
The surprising thing, a little bit, is how predictable our
conversations are now with customers. One other thing that's come
up more over the past 12 months is this notion of indemnification
[against patent and copyright claims].
More and more customers are asking us, "Help me understand what
you do from an indemnification perspective versus Hewlett-Packard
or IBM or Red Hat or Novell."
That's weighing into decisions more and more. It made me think
"We really stand behind our technology in a pretty aggressive way.
We should make sure that we get credit for that compared to Linux
in many ways." And it's actually been something that tips the
scales sometimes when people are on the fence.
Another thing that shocked me this year was the
commercialisation of Linux. When you're getting something for free,
[vendors] get a lot of "get out of jail free" cards. You see
[people saying], "Oh well. We didn't pay for it anyway, so we
shouldn't care too much about security. We'll fix it ourselves. Oh,
there's no regression testing. Who cares? We'll do that ourselves."
But once you start writing a cheque, you now have demands, and
rightfully so.
What's your take on Novell?
They're in this in-between period. They want to be
platform-agnostic a little bit, because really their business is
not NetWare. Their business is ZenWorks and all the stuff that runs
on top, and they wanted to do that on Windows and on Linux and on
NetWare. But over time, they're going to have to really get
committed to a platform and further invent that.
In Toronto in July, I had 12 top Novell resellers from around
the world for about four hours and just listened. I really have to
understand what's happening in the marketplace. And Novell is
pushing very hard, obviously, to get them up to speed on SuSE
[Linux]. They've not really laid out a great road map on how you
get from where you are today to everything on SuSE.
I do think they have the biggest opportunity to have the
stack-for-stack comparisons to Microsoft from a technology
perspective. So I do think that they are going to outpace Red Hat
as the preferred Linux distribution. [Now] I think Red Hat still
has a bit of the dominant mind share on new Linux installations as
Novell gets their act together.
So you think, in the long term, Novell is your greatest
Linux competitor?
No question, because they have the best point-to-point stack
from the kernel through to the application layer and things that go
on top of it.
Now the challenge will be [that] they're going to need to do
stuff to differentiate themselves from Red Hat, which then means
that they need to find ways to basically almost have a customised
distribution.
Where do you see IBM fitting into the competitive
picture?
I think that they're going to continue to take advantage of a
services opportunity on the complexities in the Linux environment
and say, "Hey, because of our global services business, we can
cobble things together and try to veil that for the customer and
deliver solutions."
I think that they will continue to look for ways to get an
advantage from their hardware platforms, and then I think their
tougher challenge actually will be their commercial application set
and how they tune that for different Linux distributions. As Red
Hat moves up their stack, as Novell continues to move up and build
out their stack, IBM will be forced to compete with those guys
because they won't have as much control of the kernel, of the
[Linux distribution].
I mean, Red Hat can do stuff to their [distribution] that IBM
doesn't get a vote on. [It's] the same thing with Novell, in some
ways, even though IBM has a financial stake in some of the Novell
stuff with SuSE. So I think that over time it's going to be tough
for them to really figure out how they really tighten up or tune in
their application business on top of it.
Customers want commercialised [distributions]. So IBM's going to
be even more beholden to Red Hat and to Novell to do things in that
[distribution] for their application stack to work effectively. I
don't completely see the road map for IBM. In some ways, I don't
think IBM completely sees the long-term road map for their Linux
embracement, which is the reason why maybe they haven't stepped up
to indemnify Linux in the way that HP has and some of the ways that
Novell has and Red Hat has. They've really just stayed on the
sideline and left their customers to sit there on indemnification
and some other things.
Microsoft commissioned analyst firms to do reports to
help you "get out the facts" about Linux. Are you still doing
that?
That's going to continue to be my process. If there are facts or
things that are needed, I'm going to hope that I can entice the
analyst firms to go do it on their own because they think it's also
important. But if they don't, then I'll commission it.
Do you have any lined up for the future?
They're going to continue to be around the scenarios that
customers say are important - TCO, security and reliability.
Carol
Sliwa writes for Computerworld