Miguel, Microsoft and the drool factor

By Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 25 November 2009 03:38

Opinion and Analysis

One of the best sources for news about Microsoft on the web these days is the personal blog of Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza.


When he writes about Microsoft, it resembles the kind of writing that a kid does when he gets a shiny, new toy. De Icaza drools over technology announcements from the big M - and he ensures that people know he is in that state by signing off "droolingly yours."

How the mighty of the open source world have fallen!

I was expecting a fawning post from De Icaza after Microsoft announced, at its Professional Developers' Conference last week, that it would be building desktop applications for Silverlight, its would-be Flash killer.

The Novell vice-president does not disappoint. He goes further than I ever thought he would.

For De Icaza, this is a revolution. And reading through the post, it would appear that the leader is De Icaza himself - he takes credit for this line of development in his own project Moonlight (an attempt to tailgate Silverlight) before the big M made the announcement.

I like his honesty. At least, for once, there is no subterfuge. Anyone who reads this post will not have a shred of doubt about what some people have written for a while - De Icaza is now more of a M man than an L man.

Here's one quote which exemplifies his attitude: "For the Moonlight team, this means that there is a lot of work ahead of us to bring every Silverlight 3 and 4 feature. I think I speak for the whole Mono team when I say that this is exciting, fascinating, challenging and feels like we just drank a huge energy boost drink."

It makes no difference to De Icaza that Microsoft has clearly shown that he is superfluous to their plans by bringing Silverlight directly to Linux when it suits them.

He avoid contentious issues like the plague and concentrates on the "positives".