[dba-Tech] MIcrosoft has changed

[Jim Lawrence]

In a small town, just south of the border, called Belingham, at their technical college, the annual Linuxfest just wrapped up (http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/2015). When it started there were only about a hundred in attendance but now several thousand come every years and it just keeps growing.

Different from other years though, Microsoft was in there and in full force with the biggest booth. MS has switched direction and according to the staff everything is changing at Redmond campus. 

Allow me to paraphrase some of the high-points of the conversation:
 
Microsoft is no longer going to be a competitor to Linux, Linux is now considered a first class citizen. 
Eventually, all their products will run on Linux and Linux will run in all their environments. 
Linux is considered the platform of invention and therefore Microsoft will support the platform's innovations.
Microsoft will stick strictly to industry standards rather than try to create them. 
Their service and support staff will have to be fully training in using Linux as well as Windows. 
Microsoft wants to be a service company, that also sells products...not the other way around. 
Within the company the developers run both Linux and Windows and trained Linux gurus are being deployed to all their offices around the world. 
To this end, system's people are being gathered from Africa, South America, Europe, Asia  and any other area that predominantly uses Linux. 
Within North America, business may be Linux but governments have not yet embraced it...but that will change. 
Microsoft is no longer going to write code that has already been written. 
Open source products are being fully embraced: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/index.aspx#home
Microsoft will now support many of the open source programming languages like PHP, Python and so on. 
Azure is being designed to support any platform...Windows or Linux or any combination of the same.

What this means is that young people planning a career in the computer industry better be fully versed in both Linux and Microsoft. 

I personally think all this is great! I look forward to running my MS Access on Linux without the need for products like "Wine" and be able to develop and compile .Net/JavaScript code on my Linux platform via a fully compatible VS editor.

Aside: Microsoft is making a version of Windows10 that can be containerised and deployed through the Cloud via such products as Docker, all on top of Linux (...or Windows Hyper-V). Everything will now be desktop, web and Cloud based...so there is an incredible amount of learning to take... I understand that there are free courses being given on all components of how to interface Linux and Windows products within Azure. 

I hate to brag (actually I don't) but I have been saying and hoping for this all along and now it seems to be coming true.

Jim

PS Microsoft will fully supports distros Ubuntu (all debian based distros) and Suse Linux.