* Redmond is saying that you might want to use something other than Microsoft technologies to run your enterprise
Steve Ballmer has always been a good friend of writers and journalists. Not that he likes to sit down with us and chat, but that he does so much that creates interesting stories for us whether it’s the infamous “Monkey boy” dance at the Windows XP kickoff or his various comments about Linux (“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”) he’s always doing or saying something interesting although it’s often in a “slow down to look at the accident” way.
A couple of weeks ago, though, he pulled off a major coup – not only did he effectively repudiate all the bad things he’s said about Linux but he actually came out and agreed with what I’ve been trying to tell Microsoft for quite some time – there are fewer homogeneous Windows networks than ever and, increasingly, the heterogeneity is being provided by Linux hosts.
Steve got up on stage in San Francisco with SuSE Linux boss (Novell CEO) Ron Hovsepian and while they didn’t do any ballroom dancing, they did a bit of language dancing (or, maybe, fencing) as they announced an agreement for SuSE to become the anointed and preferred Linux for use on Windows networks (click here for the details).
The most important part of this whole arrangement, to my thinking, is Ballmer’s statement that “we think customers will immediately find [the agreement] compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together.” Yes! For the first time in a very long time, Redmond is saying that you might want to use something other than Microsoft technologies to run your enterprise.
Further proof of that was offered this week when it was announced that Microsoft will distribute an application from Full Armor to ease the potentially painful migration of Group Policy ( the “ADM” format) Templates to the new ADMX format being introduced with Windows Vista. Microsoft is licensing this from Full Armor and, in turn, giving it away for free to Vista customers. The new Windows Vista Group Policy will replace Administrative Templates files (ADM) with an XML-based file format for describing Group Policy settings. This new format, called ADMX, incorporates multi-language support, an optional centralized datastore, and version control functions missing in the ADM schema. To take advantage of these capabilities, organizations must create Group Policy templates using the ADMX format. FullArmor ADMX Migrator enables administrators, with the click of a mouse, to select and convert any number of ADMs to ADMX. The newly created ADMX templates will natively support all the benefits provided by the ADMX schema. ADMX Migrator is a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
That’s two admissions in two weeks that not everything good has to be created in Redmond. And that’s very good for all of us.
