Anyone Else Notice that Microsoft Isn’t Scary Anymore?

Is Microsoft Huggable Again?

ServInt’s hosting is based on CentOS, an open-source derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that we’ve worked painstakingly on customizing over the years. We don’t generally offer Microsoft products simply because they aren’t as easy to deploy in our VPS and dedicated server implementation, and being new to this industry I simply assumed the same went for many if not most of our competitors and colleagues as well.

So I have to say I was honestly surprised last week when myself, Christian, Taylor, and Matt from ServInt all attended HostingCon at National Harbor, right across the river in Maryland, and I was first introduced to Microsoft’s resurgent presence in hosting.

The show was my first in this industry, and it was a fun and enlightening experience. I found that hosting, as a whole, was quite healthy, and most companies were using the economy as an opportunity to drive innovation and development.

If people aren’t buying the old, bring in the new.

Our good friend, Parallels Chairman and CEO Serguei Belloussov, gave the keynote last Monday outlining Parallels’ various products for the upcoming year.  He also announced that Parallels was working with Microsoft on a series of new products and product enhancements to better connect the Linux and Windows worlds.

I looked around, nervous.

Here was a room full of people who, like ServInt, have built successful companies out of primarily deploying Linux-based solutions, and not only were they talking openly about working with Microsoft, but the Microsoft and Parallels booths were right next to one another! What has the world come to?

The attitude had changed, it seems that Microsoft no longer had the reputation of being the giant evil behemoth it was once assumed to be. It’s a softer, friendlier, and — dare I say — more open company today than it was just a few years ago.

Since 2007, Microsoft implemented open xml in Office 2007 (ironically leading to the famous injunction against Word last week), they open-sourced key linux drivers under the GPLv2, and they deployed the world’s largest, longest, and arguably most successful open-beta of a closed source product to date with Windows 7. Couple this with the terrific work in the company’s XBox division and you have a company that, at least at the surface, has fundamentally changed.

Of course, 1 Microsoft Way still has plenty of testiness left.  CEO Steve Balmer’s claim in 2006 that Linux violated more than 200 Microsoft patents was absurd and the litigious spree they attempted shortly thereafter would be just as funny if it didn’t threaten to put people out of business.

Microsoft was successful because it discovered it’s strengths early, it made products that only it could make at the time. In the past decade, it’s business got  a lot more competitive and the company branched into completely new markets. It soon realized that it no longer had to just compete with huge companies, it had to compete with free.

With that, I’m interested to see what comes out of Redmond in these last few months of 2009 and beyond. Is this a new attitude towards a world of open information or a way to embed proprietary standards under the guise FLOSSy cooperation? That remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’ll wait it out on my Mac.

Photo by Thomas Hawk