[conspire] (forw) [GoLugTech] GoLUG leadership: was Linux users protested at Microsoft?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Texx (texxgadget at gmail.com):

> At the risk of looking like an idiot, what are "golug" and "elug" ?

Two Linux user groups (LUGs), the first one still going, the second one
long, long gone, both in central Florida in/around Orlando.

GOLUG = Greater Orlando Linux Users Group, www.golug.org.  That's the
one still extant.

ELUG = Everyone's Linux User Group, founded by Jeff Rose of Orlando in
1998, bit the dust three years later.


> After years of the MS "Linux must die!", I note that they are a lot more
> nice to Linux.

Around the time Ballmer left, they radically changed company strategy.
(I doubt it made a difference, but they might have gotten tired of being 
ribbed by people like me over being one of the biggest distributors 
of GPL code courtesy of Interix, at the same time that Ballmer et alii
were foaming at the mouth about the GPL being a 'cancer'.)

> With the number of Linux people that MS is hiring, I strongly suspect that
> deep under the covers, Windows is becoming Linuxified.

Sure, why not?  More power to them.

> MS really only has one killer app left, Outlook (Lookout!)
> Many have tried to duplicate it, and nobody has come up with a 100% drop in
> for it.
> Every try has only come in at 95%

Sorry, no.  MS-Outlook being a killer app is a misconception.  To make a
long story short:

It alone is nothing special, but it slots into the framework created by
MS-Exchange Server and Active Directory, which in turn include
secret-sauce protocols.  The point is that it's no good offering a
competitor for any single leg of that three-legged stool, because
medium/large businesses have been sold on the idea of buying the stool,
not individual legs -- and are insufficiently wary of lock-in, so they
shell out for the hancuffs and the jail cell.

The Unix world has a history of being (at least intermittantly) wary of 
vertical integration and preferring modular setups, but also admittedly 
hasn't tried much to compete in the AD/Exchange Server space lately.

> I think they now realize that OS sales is a financial dead end.

Er, that ship sailed a decade or so ago, I think.  They're now pushing
SaaS and online services.