MANY people may not remember this, but Ron Hovsepian admitted giving power to Microsoft in the datacentres. It was part of the deal that Novell should permit Windows to run as a host and SUSE usually be a guest. Novell was the feeble party in this relationship and by signing that notorious patent deal, Novell sort of passed its inferiority onto other GNU/Linux distributors.
Citrix Systems and Microsoft are co-mingling some of their virtual desktop technologies. But Redmond stopped short of endorsing the XenClient bare-metal PC hypervisor that chip maker Intel and Citrix are working on for delivery later this year.
Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is not yet supported, and neither are other hypervisors, such as XenServer from Citrix Systems or Hyper-V from Microsoft, and this could be a problem. FastScale said back in April - when VMware launched its ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor and its related vSphere 4.0 tools - that it would support these by the end of the year.
Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland, Wash., firm that specializes in tracking Microsoft, said that by creating a rival operating system, Google is leading with its chin.
“I don’t see why Google has to get into this business,’’ Rosoff said. “It seems like they’re waving a red flag directly at Microsoft’s core business.’’
Microsoft has crushed a host of erstwhile technology titans that posed similar head-on threats - browser maker Netscape and networking software company Novell Inc., for example, he said.
But Maritz knew how to play hardball: He made decisions that helped vanquish past Microsoft rivals, including Lotus, Novell and Netscape.
--Paul Maritz, former Microsoft Vice President, referring to Netscape