Microsoft is looking for “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” this could turn out for the good of everyone
This one depends on just what they’re looking to do. If it is a matter of opening a 360 degree position where they market and use reprehensible business practices (once again) to undermine the competition, then this is bad for everyone, and I believe in the long run for Microsoft as well. If on the other hand they use the competition to create better more reliable and secure products, then this could turn out so much better for both the consumer and in fact open source as well.Microsoft is actually a fantastic and well able company technically, although you would never think so with the way they have acted in the past with regards to non disclosure clauses and alike. A lot of great innovation happens there when they focus on the technical work. So what I am saying is that if they were to carry on creating great things like .Net, XAML and great tools like Visual Studio, this can only benefit the rest of us. Open source software will then respond in kind and they currently do with things like XUL, Mono, Eclipse and Netbeans – these are the open source counter parts, but they I’m sure, will also go on to create things that have no proprietary counterpart, like the desktop folder gadget in KDE4, it’s brilliant, once you give it a fair chance.
These things feed one another when everyone just gets on and does what they are good at (programmers that is – I don’t refer to lawyers and patent officers in this case). This competition can be great for the consumer as we all remember what happened when IE won the browser wars, years of stagnation followed, and even now – C# and ASP.Net may be great, but IE is a grave disappointment to put it lightly.
When Microsoft doesn’t have decent competition it gives us IE6 for years at a time, followed by Windows Vista. It needs competition to give itself meaning, to maintain relevance. But open source thrives on ideas that excite someone’s imagination enough to do something about it.
Link to the Microsoft job ad: Linux and Open Office Compete Lead
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