Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
But there's one factor in this whole mix which Microsoft is unable to comprehend. And that is the fervour and passion which the FOSS community, the real people behind the whole chaotic mix of technology that has made such an impact on the software world, bring to their work. The Samba team has already voiced its opposition and asked Novell to reconsider. Samba is probably one of the key projects which has brought about inter-operability between Linux and Windows; it implements sharing of UNIX resources on a heterogeneous network. Some Samba team members work for Novell.
It would be well to remember that the money which Microsoft has agreed to pay out is pocket change compared to the cash reserves it has. It is also good to bear in mind that Redmond has been trying for a long time to push Windows in the server space, the very same space in which Linux has proved to be impossible to dislodge. How do you undercut a product which has no price? Microsoft thinks it has found the way to do so.
Other factors which need to be borne in mind is that numerous companies have jumped on the Linux bandwagon in order to shore up falling revenues. Sun tried for a while and then apparently gave up; as a last-ditch effort to become relevant, Sun has released the Java source. Corel tried, accepted $US150 million from Microsoft and where is it today? Oracle is the latest to make the leap, selling Red Hat's own Linux minus the trademarks along with its Oracle database. Novell is just one more among the lot - at the beginning it did appear to be different but now it looks like it is just another one of the crowd.
While Novell may gain temporarily in terms of its bottomline, the deal will not be to its advantage in the long-term. History is simply against it.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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