Summary: Another look back at Microsoft's foresight regarding risk and this risk truly materialising

SIX YEARS ago Microsoft said that GNU/Linux was growing faster than Windows in terms of share gain (see quote below). It was possibly around this time that Microsoft had the likes of IDC count server share in terms of revenue in order to belittle GNU/Linux and make it look a lot smaller than it really is. But just under a year ago, Steve Ballmer said that "forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux." Got that?

Anyway, here are the more extensive quotes from 2003:

Again, we expect the Windows and the Linux environment to be the only environments that grow in fiscal year '04. We anticipate that we'll pick up a little bit more share in this segment, that Linux grows faster in terms of share gain, and that the rest of the folks competing against the Microsoft€® Windows platform and the Linux platform continue to decline.

[...]

Secondly, Linux and noncommercial software: We've shown you what we think the Linux share gains will be for '04. If Linux gains more share, that's an impact to us. If Linux gains share on the desktop, that's an impact to us. If we execute well, we mitigate the risk.

GNU/Linux is now a risk to Microsoft on both the server and the desktop side. Microsoft has already resorted to dumping and kickbacks in order to keep GNU/Linux at bay, but this strategy has a huge cost and it cannot starve GPL-licensed code, ever. Earlier this week -- on a couple of occasions in fact [1, 2] -- we mentioned Microsoft's 10K which explicitly warns about Red Hat (on the server) and Ubuntu (on the desktop). More articles about this continue to be written, e.g. in IDG and in Heise.

Dana Blankenhorn, whose posts have improved a lot in recent months, delivered a good analysis of Microsoft's 10K:

...Linux is modular. A Linux client, whether a netbook or an Android phone, needs to run only those modules necessary to the function it is performing at that moment. Over time open source is just cheaper to support. And by linking clients to the cloud you centralize that support load, even monetize it.

So you have competitors who can live on less food than you need, hardware evolving toward forms that must find a lower-cost form of support, and a possible breakthrough in business models that you can’t seem to touch.

The truth is that Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft itself, have become dinosaurs in a mammalian world. To compete Microsoft must evolve.

How long will Microsoft develop its very own HTML rendering engine and be the only one to inspect its code for defects and vulnerabilities? The non-Free software model is gradually made obsolete by the popularity of the Internet, which makes sharing natural and advantageous. Microsoft is a Luddite and in age of mass participation. ⬆

"It’s nice for you to admit your guys are running scared [of Free software]. They should be."

--The sum of Microsoft’s fears