Microsoft wears the Red Hat
Microsoft has finally discovered the cloud and it looks very much like an open source operating system.
Red Hat and Microsoft have, apparently, buried the hatchet after years of bitter opposition.
Microsoft, as you'll be aware, owns and runs the world's most dominant operating system (at least as far as the PC world is concerned) known as Windows, while plucky underdog Red Hat is a proponent of Linux, the free-for-all operating system that was considered Communism to Microsoft's former CEO Steve Ballmer's Capitalism.
But that was then and now, under Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella, glasnost has been declared off the back of Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure and the realisation that around 20% of the servers running on Azure are Linux-based.
"The partnership we are announcing today with Red Hat extends our commitment to offer unmatched choice and flexibility in an enterprise-grade cloud experience across the hybrid cloud. With more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 using Microsoft's cloud, for us to team with the leader in enterprise Linux allows even more businesses to move to the cloud on their terms," gushes the Microsoft press release but considering where Microsoft was only a few years ago, this is a major turning point in the future of the PC giant.
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Let's remember that MS is now the underdog - Linux runs on the great majority of computers in the technology landscape today. MS only has residual dominance on what many people think of as a "computer" - desktops and laptops. But today Linux runs 80% of mobile phones, 50%+ of tablets, the substantial majority of internet connected devices (security cameras, ADSL routers, flatscreen TVs, PVRs, and the emerging "Internet of Things"), specialised computers (e.g. in cars, entertainment systems on planes), most of the Web, almost all of "The Cloud", all of Google, Facebook, Amazon, NASA, CERN, etc., and almost all (92%+) High-Performance Computers. So, really, this is MS just trying to stay relevant as Linux leaps further ahead every day (1.5 milion new Android phones are turned on daily, for instance) and the desktop subsides into a steady state...
