José Ortega y Gasset once said, "Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are." Using that as a barometer, we can safely say that Microsoft is paranoid and running scared. At least according to The Register, who reported yesterday that theyid received a leaked Microsoft e-mail/memo to employees that exhorted them to do whatever they could to prevent Linux from taking market share.
"Linux is the long-term threat against our core business. Never forget that!" Microsoft Windows Division VP Brian Valentine supposedly said.
We should point out, just as The Register article does, that this wouldnit be the first time that evidence of Microsoftis fear of Linux was leaked to the public. The last time was a so-called "Halloween" documents. And before you throw tomatoes at the Redmond behemoth, remember that this isnit the lowest that Microsoft fallen since setting its sights on Linux; itis easy to argue that the memo is nothing but typical, corporate sales talk.
Hereis a quote from the memo, allegedly date November, 11, 2001:
Iid like to share with you are some great Linux wins weive had recently. But before I do, I need to highlight a trend that weire seeing with many of our customers. Theyire fed up with expensive UNIX/RISC solutions from Sun, HP, and IBM. Theyire looking to move and they want to migrate to the Intel platform. Unfortunately, because Linux is very similar to UNIX, and porting applications from UNIX to Linux isnit that hard, weire starting to see customers move their UNIX applications to Linux on Intel platforms. I need you to make sure that as many of these customers as possible continue to migrate off of UNIX, but on to Windows 2000 on Intel.
You can find more information in the full article from The Register.