Well, well, well. Open source OS now a serious competitor, says Ballmer

At the Microsoft Most Valued Professionals conference held in London this week, chief executive Steve Ballmer acknowledged the growing threat of Linux.

“We got beaten by Linux in the very high-end systems, but we have a whole development team despatched on that now,” he is reported as saying in the Financial Times: “Linux isn’t going to go away. Our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace.”

He added that Microsoft needed to better explain how its products added value compared with free software.

Pitching the Most Valued Professionals initiative against the open source movement, Ballmer recognised that the appeal of Linux is not just low costs, but the sense of belonging to a development community.

“Linux is not about free software, it’s about community,” he said. “It’s not like Novell: it isn’t going to run out of money. It started off bankrupt, in a way.” [More.]