Disclaimer: Utmost care has been taken to verify all the points discussed in this edition. But, still there could be errors in the document. If you stumble upon any such error, please contact me and I shall do the necessary correction. This article should be considered as a satire and NOT as a technology white paper (since there could be mistakes).

How many of you will believe me if I say that James Skinner (CEO of  McDonald) is regularly having his food at a Burger King restaurant?  If you are not even prepared to believe this (of course , a cooked-up story), I would suggest you to skip the rest of this edition.

Before I jump into such stuffs let’s do some ground work. We know that if you are running a server that has PHP installed in it, we can find the server information just by issuing:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Now, if you write your own code for a spider you can perform a similar action (in most cases you may need your own functions) and get the server information.

Here is something that I stumbled upon:

If you analyse microsoft.com using a similar bot for a long time, you can see that they are changing their operating systems time to time. But the server is M$-IIS all the time.

Here you can find few entries that says “unknown”. Well, I really don’t understand why the bot was unsuccessful in retrieving the name.

Let me try another one -search.microsoft.com. Probably this one should be more vital (from a security expert’s POV) since it is the one that does the SQL querying of data in the DB (indexed for searching).

Whoa, they are running ISS on top of Linux. This reminds me of the funny game ‘Worst Captions’  in the show “Whose line is it anyway?” !

Interesting. OK, let me try search.msn.com

Tripendicular !! Really. The server has also become unknown!

I got similar responses when I tried search.live.com and www.bing.com.

Well, let’s continue our search. I’m gonna look at different subdomains (possibly in different servers) of Live.com.

What does this mean? Well, now I got a rough idea of what M$ has in mind.

Look at that table carefully, you will also come to a similar conclusion. You can see that M$ is using Linux (which is quite famous for better security) for storing data in servers that contains files that are ‘very critical’ to the company. For example, search.live.com is the one that meddles with the databases when the user runs a query. home.lives.com contains information mostly concerning the personal settings of the user (which I believe M$ is not interested in protecting )

In other words, M$ wants to protect all the data which are ‘owned’ (or indexed) by the company and they don’t care about the user’s data. Now, look at the sub-domains 6 to 10 : all running Windows server. If you use your common sense logic you can comprehend that all these are the ones which stores(?) the ‘live mail data’ (email data). So the company does all its experiments with the users data (?) and if there is a crash only the user’s data will be in trouble.

The bottom line is this : Think twice before you signup for live.com services.

M$ : From Proprietary to Open Source

I tried to apply different ethical theories to this (yeah, for fun ) At the very outset itself it is clear that they can’t go for any deontological theory. If they try to apply theories like Kantian Philosophy, they will be in serious trouble (here they made it clear that users are mere tools to achieve their target : $$$$$). The utilitarian concepts may be invoked to save M$, but in that case they should acknowledge that they are MS and NOT M$. And , as of now, they don’t have any right to speak about Natural Rights.

Are they trying to use Hegel’s and Friedrich Schelling’s idea of Absolutism (may be in step-by-step way!)? Or is it a mere case of Ethical egoism? I believe in the latter argument (that is what the log file says!).

Steven  Ballmer (Chief Executive Officer of M$) says to its employees that “you also have a responsibility to raise compliance and ethics concerns through our established channels” and describe a lot about the same in the Standards of Business Conduct (Click here to view the document ). But how many of them raised these concerns before the board?

One of M$’s own lawyers says “Even a monopoly is free to compete aggressively. I read in the press how Microsoft isn’t contrite. We’re not going to church here. It’s not confession. It’s litigation.” Is this a new form of aggression ? You might ask how it becomes aggression. Is that by infiltration? No, I would say, by intrusion!

You can imagine what may happen if you allow your enemies to stay in your home. I can assure that such a thing will never happen in our ‘open home’. The possible outcome could be M$ becoming a very active and prominent member in our home. But, by that time M$ would have been remodelled itself to MS – a transparent open source promoter like RedHat or Novell.

Once a business strategy analyst said “As they (M$) have probably noticed, their future is not in operating systems anymore.” That is true. That is why they are working on ‘software as a service’ sector. But when they found the Big G in the field, we saw a shudder running down through their nerves.

Now M$ is using many servers, handled by the Akamai caching system, that run Linux. They should also extend this to their end users. In that case they can say that they are doing some utilitarian tasks (since they are improvising the lots of the end users by giving them Linux based machines to store data).

If that being their motive, there is no wonder why M$ is now contributing in Linux Drivers . And the software gaint has a  Linux Community Platform Strategy and an Open Source Technology Center! They just want to slow the process of migration (so that it wouldn’t effect the stock holders – and in turn the stake holders – from an economic POV). That could be the reason why people like Tom Hanrahan say “Our initial goal in developing the code was to enable Linux to run as a virtual machine on top of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor and implementation of virtualization”. The word ‘initial’ is the ‘hidden code’ that speaks about their (plausible) long term plan.

Of course there is no big deal about ‘Gate’s decision to ‘quit’ his job’, but could it be this ideological change (a strategic one !) that forced him to become its non-executive chairman?

Latest News: M$ is again the Platinum Level sponsor of the annual Open Source Business Conference  !!!