Tucci and Ballmer Create an Attack Plan

FURTHER to yesterday's analysis of VMware and Microsoft, here is another new article about EMC's relationship which includes some Linux-hostile agenda.

Q: Who do each of you see as your biggest competitor today in the corporate technology world? Ballmer: I think if you look on the enterprise side today, there's two primary forces. I would say certainly Oracle is on the list of primary competition and then primarily Linux-based alternatives.

Now, IBM shows up for sure. In certain spots we overlap with Cisco. Google is starting to show up a little bit. But certainly Oracle is a primary competitor as is Linux. But Linux as sponsored by IBM, but it's Linux more than it is any IBM product. That's the big competitive dynamic for us in the enterprise.

[...]

Ballmer: And the partnership makes us stronger versus our Linux-based alternatives on the desktop. Part of the way we compete with open source desktop stuff is by having stronger total value-add. We can't beat Linux on initial price. So, the notion of being able to go and say, here's a solution that you can really use to do fantastic security, fantastic data loss prevention from the client through the back-end, that's a powerful part of our proposition. And that's an example of how you get these things to dovetail.

The remarks from Tucci^** seem to more or less concur with Ballmer's. It is appalling. And as a side note, the reader can also sense Ballmer's fear of GNU/Linux in the text above. This isn't unusual because Ballmer also described GNU/Linux as Microsoft's biggest threat one year ago.

It's worth adding that another Microsoft ally, Fortify to be precise, is once again attacking Free software. Glyn Moody rebuts:

Were they, rather, suggesting it might be useful to take a look at stuff like, you know, GNU/Linux, Apache, MySQL? That was more the impression I got. And is this covered in the slightest by the Fortify Software report? No, I thought not.

In other words, the current press release is extrapolating from some old research on 11 Java packages to the entire open source ecosystem.

[...]

Well, I'd say it's highly questionable whether Fortify Software has thought this issue through before criticising the Tory party for *supporting* open source.

We have already shown how Fortify and Microsoft are connected (also mentioned in [1, 2] very briefly). Rather than Microsoft attacking these policies of the Tories directly it can unleashes its 'attack dogs' or rely on its ecosystem to attack all threats without explicit invocation. ⬆

Flaming for Microsoft

_____ ^**The merciless person who expelled the head of VMware and replaced her with the newly-installed Microsoft executive who came through EMC first.