Tag the Dog

Rob Enderle wraps a Microsoft love kiss around some action I'd love to get a piece of: the notion that unless something dramatically changes, by 2015 we'll be largely wondering what all the fuss surrounding Linux was really about. Even Steve Ballmer might find Enderle's blissful analysis of the similarities between Netscape and the open source movement hard to swallow. How about this one, Steve: Virtually none of this lower prices in the third world, more secure, less crashing, Shared Source would have happened had it not been for Linux, and had it not, we would have seen a different version of Longhorn (the next version of Microsoft Windows) than we will now see, and we probably would have liked it vastly less as a result.

Oh, so Netscape woke Microsoft up enough to take over the Internet, and now Linux is performing a similar service in prodding Longhorn to do what? Did Linux incent Microsoft to leap ahead with XML in Office, or propel search to the forefront, or drive RSS to the center of the Longhorn desktop? Don't think so--more likely, Microsoft's need to rationalize updates is the fundamental driver. Basic economics drives Office's huge share of MS revenue--need money, innovate. Need innovate, build or buy. Enderle seems stuck in a vacuum, issuing tactical analysis about campaigns from the last war while the Network Economy steamrolls Wall Street (NYSE/Archipelago and NASDAQ/Instinet) and Google's revenue keeps doubling. Hey Rob, you're debating OS/2 and Netscape while Marc Andreesen pops up as one of the investors in del.icio.us and Adam Bosworth proclaims RSS the new data model.

 Me, I just clicked on my Firefox experimental bookmarklet and tagged Rob's story on my del.icio.us feed.