Jeff Jaffe’s Blog

On September 5th, Microsoft announced agreement with Novell to bring their Silverlight multimedia framework to Linux via a further collaboration between the two companies. The best place to learn more about the details of this is Miguel de Icaza’s blog.

Herein, I reflect on how it relates to Novell’s broader strategy.

Novell technical strategy

Please look at my earlier blog for Novell’s technical strategy. Some of the important principles are:

• A great enterprise Linux distribution

• Linux which excels from the desktop to data center

• Strong hooks for interoperability.

This Silverlight partnership is another element that fills in this strategy. Our desktop is not only outstanding technically, but adds applications and frameworks on top of Linux which interoperate with Windows. The benefits of Microsoft’s investments in Silverlight are brought to the Linux desktop.

So this ties to the three principles:

• We address a need of enterprise customers to bring the Windows media frameworks

• We add capability on the Linux desktop

• Done via interoperability.

The voice of the customer

When Microsoft and Novell announced our original partnership on November 2, 2006, we emphasized that the primary driver for both companies was the voice of the customer. The customer had two primary growth environments for the future: Windows and Linux – and they wanted vendors to work together on interoperability.

This continues to be a driver for our partnership. Customers have reacted favorably to Silverlight, and they have reacted favorably to Miguel’s team’s bringing this to Linux via the Moonlight project.

It is significant that the recent customer demand has extended to the support of multimedia frameworks on the Linux desktop. There is a considerable body of content developed with the Microsoft multimedia frameworks, and it is not surprising that the growing Linux desktop community wants access to this.

Choosing areas for collaboration

In my February 26 posting, I discussed how Novell and Microsoft chose areas for collaboration. At the time we selected four primary areas. I argued that, with literally scores of potential collaboration areas, if we tried to do everything we would get nothing done. We prioritized and focused on immediate needs.

I also indicated that this was just the beginning. Both companies recognize the customer demand to make the Windows world and Linux world work better together. Our collaboration is the best way to accomplish this.

Of all of the areas of customer requests, an area of particular excitement is to have richer and more varied multimedia frameworks on Linux that interoperate with the frameworks used by Microsoft. Soon after Silverlight’s introduction, our Mono team began working on the Moonlight implementation on Linux and heard a high degree of enthusiasm from Linux users. This became the driver for the Moonlight collaboration.

Another application running on Linux

Not to be lost in the broad discussion of interoperability is the more basic desire to grow applications on Linux. Both Red Hat and Novell have for many years worked with both open source application vendors as well as proprietary application vendors to get their solutions running on Linux. This is the next step in this honored tradition. With the bonus, that the application vendor in this instance is Microsoft!

The growing importance of the Linux desktop

I give Microsoft a great deal of credit for their growing recognition of the importance of Linux and the Linux desktop. The partnership we announced last fall centered principally around the Linux server, although one element of our collaboration roadmap was interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. With Moonlight, there is tacit recognition that the Linux desktop is developing momentum, and there is desire for technology sharing across these platforms.

A growing, professional partnership between Microsoft and Novell

My final comment relates to the nature of Novell’s relationship with Microsoft. Many bilateral vendor partnerships seem to come and go. Vendors align for a moment of time when there is momentary confluence of interest. Then a bitter dispute breaks it asunder.

I don’t anticipate such a temporal relationship between Microsoft and Novell. For Novell’s part, our key corporate strategy is to infuse in Linux all of the capabilities required for an enterprise. Most of these are done purely by the open source community, in open source. We don’t need proprietary help to get increased reliability, security, virtualization, availability, or desktop excitement.

But customers insist on interoperability with Windows, and our strategy is to listen to customers. Given Window’s important role in today’s customer infrastructure , we are required to work with Microsoft on a constant pace of interoperability enhancements.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under General, Linux Operating Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.