The Oregonian interviewed Steve Ballmer yesterday when he was in town for the dedication of a new engineering building at PSU. Steve was asked point blank about Microsoft getting on in years and if he hoped to capture some of the growing energy emanating from the open source movement here in Oregon (as seen at the OSDL in Beaverton and the Open Source Lab here at Oregon State, among other things):
“There’s been no technology innovation to speak of out of Linux!” he exclaimed. Ballmer pointed to the company’s announcement last week that it is upping R&D spending. “We’re not middle-aged! We’ve got a big, exciting future!”
In a conversation I had last summer with OSDL’s Stuart Cohen, Stuart told me that he’s convinced Microsoft will ultimately make a version of Office for Linux –and said he suspects Microsoft already has a Linux version of Office running in a lab somewhere in Redmond.
“Stuart’s wrong” on the latter, Ballmer told me today, but might someday be right on the former: “If there was demand and we thought we could get paid for it, we’d consider it,” he said.
“No technology innovation” is a pretty dumb statement but not surprising given Microsoft’s drive to show everybody that they still have the big brains churning out million dollar ideas. Regarding Office on Linux, it would be a very hard sell, both for the price reason Ballmer mentions and the fact that it’s Microsoft. Open Office still isn’t quite as polished as the genuine article but it’s getting there and even has benefits in some areas.
A later post on the Oregonian’s Silicon Forest weblog shares Ballmer’s insights on Vista and development for multi-core chips.
Open Office is an OSS implementation of Microsoft Office. The Linux kernel is very similar to Solaris. Many of the applications made for Linux operating systems are free versions of what you can buy for other operating systems. I’m not surprised at his statement, except except for him saying “out of Linux,” which implies that Linux is a centralized organization, which it isn’t.
The innovation comes mainly in the method of development – mainly by freelance volunteers. I am still not sure that that kind of method has been tested critically enough for long enough to call it a viable alternative to commercial software.