Novell and Microsoft

MICROSOFT and Novell are growing closer all the time. The more they struggle, the more they huddle. Novell has just shown signs of more collaboration with Xenocode, which according to this new report is a "six-year-old, Seattle-based, lightweight application virtualization player full of Microsoft veterans." The is not the first time that Novell collaborates with them [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and this leaves room for more Microsoft influence.

Microsoft's Poaching of Yahoo Executives

Yahoo! is still besieged by Microsoft [1, 2, 3], which wants to grab its market share and brains. It's a lot cheaper than acquiring the company. According to reports from Microsoft watchers, Microsoft has just snatched another Yahoo executive who was focused on search.

Microsoft has hired Larry Heck, a Yahoo search executive, to join its online services division.

[...]

Most recently, Heck was vice president, search and advertising sciences at Yahoo Labs.

In a somewhat sarcastic essay, Cringley argues that "Yahoo should buy Microsoft". Apart from an eye-catching headline, there is not much sustance, but Mark repeats his observation that Microsoft needs to lay off tens of thousands of employees.

My last column was all about the culture of Microsoft and how it makes real change difficult for the company. It’s not just at Microsoft that these things happen, by the way: nearly all mature organizations get into similar ruts. And if, like Microsoft, they are spectacularly profitable ruts, well then it isn’t surprising that things stay more or less permanently dysfunctional.

[...]

Next column we’ll deal with the rest of Microsoft, chopping those 20,000 to 50,000 heads.

Microsoft Ecosystem Smears Open Source

According to this from Slashdot, the Microsoft ecosystem is attacking Free/Open Source software behind closed doors. It's like a whisper campaign.

Lately there has been a huge push by Certified Microsoft Professionals and their companies to call (potential) clients and warn them of the dangers of open source. This week I received calls from four different customers saying that they were warned that they are dangerously insecure because they run open source operating systems or software, because 'anyone can read the code and hack you with ease.'

We have seen a lot of this recently. One just needs to follow the money in order to understand the credibility of the arguers.

In other related news, further to earlier reports, over 160 banks appear to have just been compromised due to "malware".

Heartland data breach hit 160 banks (and rising)

[...]

Malware planted on servers was used to steal card data. It didn't say how many records were exposed and how many financial institutions were affected by the breach. Heartland only said that it processed 100m transactions a month on behalf of 250,000 merchants, sparking concerns that the extent of the problem might rival that of the infamous TJX breach.

Was this "malware" installed on UNIX/Linux machines? Not likely. ⬆