Bonum Certa Men Certa

Selling Out to a Company on the Decline

Don't give in to Microsoft

THE MYTH OF an invincible, unavoidable and inevitable Microsoft is not justified. There are apparently redundancies to be announced shortly.

In a report today, Goldman Sachs' Sarah Friar says layoffs at Microsoft are "likely" and would be "good for the shares."


We wrote about this several days ago and even IDG covers it.

Combine these gloomy prospects with the widespread expectation that Microsoft's revenues may fall short of expectations for the first quarter since 2000, and there certainly seem to be hard times ahead for the gang from Redmond.


There are also some enlightening comments about Microsoft layoffs. So who would actually be willing to join in? Who would give up on basic principles?

Melvin Calimag, an author who has mostly published Linux-hostile articles (examples in [1, 2]) since his journey to Redmond, is now doing another article about Microsoft's embrace-and-extend of open source in the Philippines. Their motives ought to be clear [1, 2, 3].

With interoperability as a goal, Microsoft Philippines has forged a deal with a Filipino-owned open source software development house to "jointly build developer tools" and to "enable the creation of more interoperable programs."


Translation: it needs to run on Windows.

The American software giant’s partnership with Exist Global is the first such deal that Microsoft has formed with an open source company in the Philippines.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has lately been accelerating its collaboration with the open source industry. The company announced last September the opening in the Philippines of its first interoperability lab in Asia located at the CICT building in Quezon City. It also said it will soon unveil a similar facility at the University of the Philippines.

[...]

Under the partnership, Microsoft is providing information including software development kits, technical documentation and other publicly available materials, as well as Microsoft software that will aid Exist develop the data testing and integration tools.

"The importance of strong integration into Visual Studio for the adoption of .Net projects will be paramount. The support and contribution from Microsoft through this partnership will ensure that. There is also strong demand for automated testing being an essential part of automated builds, and provision of a .Net testing project like NFixture will meet that demand," Damarillo noted.


As we wrote a month ago, seeing Winston Damarillo sell out like this is disappointing, but Dana Blankenhorn tries denying that there is a problem with it.

Unholy, Sparky? Really? The story describes a deal between Winston Demarillo’s Exist Global and Microsoft to “enable the creation of more interoperable programs.”


This ZDNet blog is also feeding Steve Ballmer's friends at Gartner. In the same blog on the same very day, and courtesy of Paula Rooney: "Gartner doles out sobering predictions for open source use in the enterprise for next 5 years." This group's lack of integrity didn't prevent Bob Sutor from referencing this either. It's important to be aware that Gartner contributes to confusion around the term "open source" -- much like Microsoft desires.

"David Smith commented that Gartner will not bash MS if MS chooses to slip Vista."

--Jamin Spilzer, Microsoft



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