Summary: A migration away from SUSE shows that bindings between Windows and SUSE are not so crucial after all; Microsoft publicly explains reluctance to be interoperable

Novell and Microsoft market themselves based on "interoperability" as a key selling point, but as we pointed out yesterday, Kuwait had no problem moving from SUSE to Red Hat. Here is the press release about it.

Yesterday we also showed that Microsoft excludes GNU/Linux when it comes to a Web-based Office (there are more reports about it, mostly derived from the one we referenced earlier). Is this interoperability? Of course not.

Here is Microsoft's 'Office man' explaining the motives:

From ChannelWeb

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division and one of the company’s foremost cloud proponents, also dismissed Google’s claims of Office-Docs interoperability.

“It clearly shows their lack of maturity and lack of understanding for the business market,” Elop told The New York Times Wednesday. “Companies don’t want to mix their technology.”

I am shocked, shocked, to hear Microsoft come out against interoperability.

We wrote about Elop a few days ago and shown above is an explanation of why Microsoft persisted with bribes and other corruption to pass OOXML as 'open' rather than embrace real standards.

But the more important point is that despite Microsoft's attempt to make the Microsoft-taxed distribution work better with Windows, large deployments can easily have SUSE substituted with Red Hat. Nobody needs SUSE. ⬆