Summary: Microsoft's position is slipping as GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux-powered Web clusters gain considerable momentum

AS we mentioned earlier, Microsoft loses a lot of money online and the Bing-sponsored blog finally drops some numbers:

Windows Live lost $560m in FY09

[...]

Most notably, Windows Live lost $560 million in Microsoft's 2009 fiscal year, on revenue of $520 million, according to one of the slides that accompanied the online presentation.

This essentially means that as GNU/Linux continues to take away Microsoft's revenue from Office and Windows Microsoft may be left operating at a loss. Randall Kennedy has just called Office Web Apps "The beginning of the end for Microsoft". It's sensationalist, sure, but it is still a timely reminder of the fact that Microsoft must move online to compete (and it fails to compete there). The summary of this op-ed goes like this:

How Microsoft's half-hearted embrace of cloud computing has signaled the start of an inexorable slide into obsolescence

IBM and Microsoft are meanwhile vying for PHP's love. Via Bob Sutor:

A group of prominent cloud vendors has banded together behind an open source project that promises to make application services available across clouds. Zend Technologies, the supplier of the PHP scripting language, launched the Simple API project Tuesday, and IBM and Microsoft were among the first vendors to sign on.

Sadly for Microsoft, Zend said a few months ago that 95% among Zend clients choose GNU/Linux for deployment on the server. Microsoft is losing in a very big way. ⬆

"The Internet? We are not interested in it."

--Bill Gates, 1993