Ubuntu chief mua muas Microsoft
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Dirty uncle not welcome Leader of the Ubuntu tribe Mark Shuttleworth has no plans to invite dirty uncle Microsoft over for patent protection talks.â¦
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Microsoft has tapped a former executive at Walt Disney to fill its CIO position, a move that shows the company continuing to fill top executive positions from outside the company.Tony Scott, who most recently was CIO at Walt Disney, will take over that same role at Microsoft in February, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. Scott, who also will be a corporate vice president at Microsoft, replaces Stuart Scott, who&#160;departed the company in November. The two are not related.Scott will manage Microsoft&#39;s 4,000-person IT organization, which is responsible for all of the technology systems supporting the company&#39;s worldwide sales, marketing, and services operations, as well as the enterprise systems and applications for all corporate processes.At Disney, where he was senior vice president in addition to CIO, Scott was the first CIO to manage the entire company&#39;s IT systems, according to Microsoft. Prior to Disney, Scott was CTO at General Motors and vice president of operations at Bristol-Meyers Squibb.There are a lot of new faces in the ranks of upper management at Microsoft, with a rash of them signing on to the company in the last six months. Just last week Microsoft revealed that company veteran Jeff Raikes, president of its Business Division, will&#160;leave the company in September. The company tapped an outside executive -- former Juniper Networks, Macromedia, and Adobe executive Stephen Elop -- to fill that role.Other new hires to the company since last July include: Dan Reed, Microsoft Research director of scalable and multicore computing in November; Robert Youngjohns, president of North American sales and marketing and corporate vice president in November; Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group in August; and Don Mattick, senior vice president, Interactive Entertainment Business in July.There is likely more new blood to come as Microsoft also confirmed last week several other executive departures: Bruce Jaffe, corporate vice president of corporate development; Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft&#39;s general manager of platform strategy; and&#160;Rob Short, corporate vice president of the Windows Core Technology group.Apart from CEO Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft&#39;s entertainment and devices division, many of the company&#39;s other top executives have joined the company in the past three years. They include the man widely seen as Gates&#39; successor, Chief Architect Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005. Kevin Turner, Microsoft&#39;s chief operating officer, and Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Online Services Group, also joined the company that year.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft has appointed an executive to lead its controversial efforts to make its software more interoperable with Novell's Suse Linux. The company has named Tom Hanrahan to the new position of director of Linux interoperability, reporting to Sam Ramji, director of platform technology strategy. Ramji runs the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft tests its products to see how they interact with Linux and other open-source software. Hanrahan's duties will include running the new Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab,Â announced in November when the two companies formed a patent-licensing and interoperability deal. The deal will, in part, ensure Novell's Suse Linux works better with Windows in environments where the two OSes co-exist. Experts from both companies will work in the Microsoft/Novell Interoperability Lab to test and build interoperable offerings. As part of their deal, Microsoft and Novell also are co-marketing each other's technology, and Microsoft is offering Suse Linux maintenance and support coupons to customers who want to run the OS in their IT environments. But Microsoft's ability to do the latter could be threatened by the passage of the GNU GPLv3 (General Public License Version 3) in light of bold claims by the vendor thatÂ it will seek damages for 235 of its patentsÂ it says both Linux and other open-source software violate. A provision of GPLv3 provides patent protection for anyone receiving software, such as Linux, distributed by the license. Microsoft executives also have used the Novell deal as the blueprint for how it wants companies violating its patents to pay for them, while Novell insists to this day its Linux distribution does not infringe on any Microsoft patents. Prior to joining Microsoft, Hanrahan was director of engineering at the Linux Foundation. He also has served as senior program manager in charge of software development and testing at IBM's Linux Technology Center in Oregon. Before that, he spent 11 years at Sequent Computer Systems and several years working for Intel.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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In the face of growing competition from Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a four-page memo to customers on Wednesday outlining the economic and security advantages Windows has over Linux, the potential dangers of open source involving indemnification, and the intent to aggressively convince Unix shops to migrate to Windows.
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Valentine's Day saw a defection from the Microsoft mobile camp, perhaps without a kiss. Leaving is Microsoft Senior Vice President Pieter Knook, who will head a new Internet Services division that Vodafone Group Plc announced Tuesday. In this new role, Knook will direct the development and delivery of Vodafone's consumer Internet business.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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By MATTHEW FORDAHL    SAN JOSE, Calif.  -- After years of battling Microsoft Corp...
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In the spirit of being at the university, the Microsoft chairman also talked about when open-source licenses make sense. By Aaron Ricadela.
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And sets alarm bells ringing in open source community Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that every user of the open source Linux system could owe his company money for using its intellectual property. The statement will confirm the worst fears of the open source community.â¦
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made a &quot;pre-emptive strike&quot; against Linux, which is fast becoming a bigger thorn in the software giant&#39;s side.
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Although some news reports have stated that Microsoft also is looking for ways to work more closely with OpenOffice.org developers, the project&#39;s community manager, Louis Suarez-Potts, told
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InfoWorld - In the face of growing competition from Linux, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered a four-page memo to customers on Wednesday outlining the economic and security advantages Windows has over Linux, the potential dangers of open source involving indemnification, and the intent to aggressively convince Unix shops to migrate to Windows.
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday plunged headfirst into the controversial waters of comparing the benefits and advantages of the Windows platform with Unix and Linux in an executive e-mail he sent to customers, partners and subscribers.
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Microsoft has renewed its attack on Linux, its primary rival in the business software market, with Chief Executive Steve Ballmer telling customers in a letter sent the
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Veteran exit One of the architects of Windows Vista is leaving Microsoft weeks after it emerged he would be re-assigned once the delayed operating system is launched.â¦
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Blog: What challenges does the CEO of an open source company face? Matt Asay finds out.
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By Saul Hansell  There is a lot about the way Microsoft has run its Internet business that Steve Berkowitz wants to change. But he is finding it more difficult than he expected.