Microsoft starting to acknowledge a few of their competitors

Published on May 23rd, 2006 in General, Linux, Windows

Have you noticed? Microsoft seems to acknowledge a few of its toughest competitors out there. Firefox and Linux for example. As you can see in the screenshot, Microsoft has enabled Firefox users as well, to install a “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” extension right into their favourite browsers. Well, as we all know, it’s not really an advantage, it’s just a security measure Microsoft has undertaken, to ensure, that your Operating System is licensed properly. Otherwise, you won’t be able to download SDK, Service Packs and so on. There are already numerous hacks out there, that enable to download it anyway. But that’s another story.

The thing with Linux is, that Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 finally “officially” supports Linux, it’s also free by the way, so if you’re interested, you should definetely take a look at it. Not that I use it, I’d much rather use VMWare, because it’s faster, has some pretty nifty features and also runs on Linux. Virtual Server of course only runs on Windows hosts. But never the less, Microsoft officially started to acknowledge Linux and also lists it as one of the features of its Virtual Server product. They seem to have noticed, that Linux won’t go away anymore. So they have to produce better Software and also respect it to some degree and provide compatible products, because the number of companies using a heterogenous datacenter is increasing steadily. So there clearly is a demand from its customers who pay overpriced Windows Server lincensing fees.

Shout it out!