Well after several years of losing server market share to Linux, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft finally mentioned the open source “problem” in his annual strategy memo to employees.

“While the noncommercial model may lead to many flavors of software, getting broad, consistent innovation requires coordination across many technology components. In the event of needed enhancements or fixes, the Linux development community, no matter how well intentioned, simply cannot advance Linux the way we can – and must – innovate in Windows.” — Steve Ballmer I’m sorry: ” broad, consistent innovation “…. I think Mr. Ballmer has forgotten the definition of innovate(tion):innovate
\In”no*vate\
1. To begin or introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time.
2. To change or alter by introducing something new; to remodel; to revolutionize.

There is NO such thing as CONSISTENT INNOVATION. You can’t create something out of nothing on a schedule… you can’t revolutionize every tuesday…

Sure, working to rollout innovations across platforms and technologies is important if not vital, but standardizing existing innovations and actually innovating are 2 COMPLETELY DIFFERENT things… Though in Mr. Ballmer’s defense, M$ historical strategy has been to buy, steal, or recreate other’s innovations and then use any means necessary to insure that THEIR flavor of software becomes the standard… so I guess you can’t blame a guy working at a company that has never come up with a single innovation to not really know what that word means…

But I digress, open source linux is finally on M$’s radar… I wonder what has them worried the fact that it’s more stable, reliable AND secure or the fact that it’s FREE.

Linux finally gets MS’s attention

UPDATE 5-2-03: I thought about this some more today. Perhaps the problem is that Steve Ballmer doesn’t realize that innovate means to CREATE new things, not just add new things. You know like slowly calling all of the software that you create as a company part of the operating system…

(Steve Ballmer’s Thoughts???) Let’s see surfing the web… people do that a lot… let’s bundle Internet Explorer with Windows -er- I mean let’s integrate this web browsing feature into Windows…. Chat, people chat online… no seems to use our IM client though so maybe that should be added to windows to get people to use our product instead of downloading a better one -er- I mean increase the functionality of Windows… what’s next oh yes, Windows Media Player -heck- it even has Windows in the NAME we definiately need to bundle -er- incorporate that into Windows… what else? Oh, MS Flight Simulator that would be another great INNOVATION we could add to Windows… I mean it is Tuesday; Innovation Day

Operating System [def]
(OS) The low-level software which handles the interface to hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, allowing applications to be written without knowledge of hardware specifics and presents a default interface to the user when no application program is running.Hardware Specific: You don’t need to buy the Pentium 4, Western Digital Hard Drive, Sony CD-R, GeForce 4200×8 3D Card version OR the AMD XP, Seagate Hard Drive, Fuji CD-R, ATI 5800XT 3D Card version of Unreal Tournament 2004 depending on your computer — you just buy a copy that works with Windows (I am actually over-simplifing here so as not to overload the non-techies… it would actually be more detailed and more technical than the example above)