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Longhorn and the Linux long-game

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Longhorn

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 09 Mar 2005 12:20 GMT

"Open source is a very big problem for Microsoft because it has seen open source and Linux coming in and winning market share. It can't fight on price because of value issues, the need for R&D investment and the fact that it has to maintain margins, so the only thing it can do is to provide another vision," he says.

The pitch from Microsoft will be that it can provide an integrated infrastructure solution where all of the individual elements such as the client and server operating systems, database, applications and the like will work closely together.

The software giant will try to position itself as a one-stop provider and highlight the fact that this level of integration in the software stack is simply not available in the Linux or open source world, although a raft of start-ups have emerged in the US over the last 12 months to try and address this very issue.

"Customers love open source because it's cheap and they think it's more reliable and secure than Microsoft, but you need different pieces and the problem is integration, which is real. This costs a lot of money so Microsoft is trying to fight it here and Longhorn is a big piece of that strategy," says consultant Nguyen van Tan.

He claims the only other player that can seriously rival Microsoft in its breadth of offerings is IBM, and Big Blue is basing its strategy for control of an organisation's infrastructure on Linux and Java.

IBM's message here is that its infrastructure framework is based on open standards that work in heterogeneous environments and which third parties can plug their offerings into.

As its infrastructure offerings conform to the concepts of portability and interoperability, IBM claims to be providing freedom of choice to customers that don't want to be forced down a pure Microsoft route or end up locked into the .Net development architecture and data model, of which Longhorn is a foundation stone.

"IBM and Microsoft are the two dominant industry players and it's going to be very much a battle royal to win mind share, particularly in the enterprise community. But it will be an interesting battle because they're both going in with very different weapons," says MWD's Machehiter.