I read through the recently posted piece by Sam Gustin on AOL's beta site, Daily Finance, looking for the big deal after the headline:  Microsoft 'indoctrinates' Best Buy workers with anti-Linux 'lies.'

Uh, what?

"Microsoft is 'indoctrinating' Best Buy workers to sell its highly anticipated Windows 7 operating system using outright lies about the performance of open-source competitor Linux, according to Linux experts and at least one Best Buy employee who has seen the alleged Microsoft training slides," Gustin reported.

"Some Linux experts are charging Microsoft with deliberately 'indoctrinating' Best Buy employees to misinform the public about the relative merits of Windows 7 and Linux."

This isn't university research, it's marketing. So someone at Best Buy posted the slides on a Web site...what's the big deal? I worked with the financial services industry group at Microsoft for years, and they disparaged and disliked Linux. Maybe hated is a better choice of words.  They said it would never be ready for the enterprise.

Oh well, so much for the power of prediction. But Microsoft has also worked at integrating Windows and Linux. The company has an open source section on its web site

I have covered some of this on my blog at techandfinance.com, such  as this note more than a year ago: "Last week at Linux on Wall Street Peter Rodriques, an alliance manager at Microsoft who used to be on the finserv team, was on stage with Novell to explain how the companies were working together."

It's no secret that Microsoft is a fierce competitor, but the company is also pretty realistic, eventually, and will find a way to work with Linux and other open source systems.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed