Lora Bentley spoke with Bernard Golden, renowned open source expert, author and CEO of Navica, an open source integration and consulting company.

Bentley: How has the success of Linux in the mainstream enterprise affected what Microsoft is doing now with the new Vista operating system?

Golden: I don't know that Microsoft has directly said "We're going to have to put something into Vista to compete against the Linux desktop," per se. There was no, "Well, they're doing something so we have to do it, too." What I would say is that they clearly recognize that they have challenges in regard to commoditization and people looking and saying, "Why do I need a new desktop? I've got XP and it works fine." They face some real challenges. If you've tracked this all along, they've gradually been shedding features that were going to be in the product. As a standalone product, really its main feature is that it's got this new interface.

Bentley: Has the continuing trend toward open source generally impacted the way Microsoft is doing business?

Golden: As to how Microsoft has been affected by open source, they're trying to create more of, if I could say, an "ecosystem" around their products so that people won't be saying, "Where's the value in having a Microsoft desktop (or a Linux desktop)? I can get something that will run my computer, it has an office suite, a mail client... So where's the value [in the brand name]?" Because going down that road, if [a desktop can be obtained for] free, Microsoft is faced with "How much more can we charge for that same functionality? So what they're doing - rather cleverly - is trying to present Vista as an integral part of an ecosystem - for business and for the home as well.

On the business side, it's getting more wired into Exchange Server with a lot of search and messaging capability. If you've got Exchange, you really want Vista, and conversely, if you've got Vista then you'll really want to upgrade your Exchange. That's an effort on Microsoft's part to make upgrading to Vista not a question on its own merits, but more a question of, "Do you want to run your business more efficiently?" I think what Microsoft has realized is that given that there's a good enough vanilla desktop in the market, they recognized that they had to respond to it by delivering more value, and the direction they're going with that is tying it more directly into the overall infrastructure of the company, of all the different parts.

Bentley: Do you know if any of Vista was built using collaborative or shared source methods that Microsoft seemed to adopt in response to the open source movement?

Golden: Probably more meaningful around that question, and it's really more about open standards than it is about open source, is the effort going on in the European Union to force them to document their interfaces. They've really put the hammer down on Microsoft to open up their documentation to make it easier for products to interoperate with them. That is quite a step because that makes it easier for other products to work with Microsoft's products, and in a way, will give those other software products the opportunity to compete. In other words, it wouldn't just be SharePoint Server that's able to talk to those things, to be part of that ecosystem, but you could build something else that would slide into that.

Bentley: It seems as if that has been a long time in coming?

Golden: Well, it's a soap opera that's dragged on for a long time. Microsoft kind of dragged their feet, and then they dumped a ton of documentation on [the European Commission] in a "Here's the haystack, you find the needles," kind of approach. I have to really give the woman who runs that committee in the European Union credit. She really stepped up to them and said, "That's not good enough." To me, that has some real potential.

Bentley: What significance is there to the fact that Microsoft announced its partnership with Novell around the same time that Vista was released?

Golden: In my mind, I see those announcements being much more important to Longhorn Server than they are to Vista. I think the thing with Novell was going on for months; Vista, obviously has been going on for years. I tend to think that the timing of the Novell announcement was more coincidental than correlative.

Bentley: How much of the Microsoft-Novell agreement (or future agreements like it) will affect how Vista evolves?

Golden: I do think that some of it will because they've clearly acknowledged that Linux is going to be a major part of the server infrastructure, so they've got to make sure Vista works well with it. Microsoft has clearly thrown in the towel on the strategy of trying to beat back Linux in the data center. They've gotten the message that their customer base wants Microsoft products to work well with Linux. I would expect that we'll see better interoperability through Samba, for example, which will be good. Virtualization is one of the three things they said they were going to do technical cooperation with Novell on, so figuring out how that will evolve on the desktop in terms of interoperability, I think, will be very important.