OneAndOneIs2

There's an interesting post on one of Sun's blogs in response to MS's recent patent FUD.

Sun still has its issues with FOSS, but nobody can say that they haven't contributed a lot. OpenOffice and Java, for starters. And the post has some advice for Microsoft that they'd be very, very well-advised to take.

Essentially, the article boils down to: Sun was badly threatened by Linux and FOSS too once. Instead of threatening our own customers to make them stay with us, we improved our game, took advantage of what FOSS had to offer, and here we are back on track: We have products that our customers want to buy from us.

MS is clearly panicking: Vista's sales are lousy and the barriers to switching to Linux are falling one by one: It's easier to install than Windows; it's going to be available pre-installed from a major vendor like Windows; It's got better hardware support than Windows; Gamers are switching from PCs to consoles so the lack of games doesn't matter much. And so on.

There was a time when MS could say "It's our way or the highway" - when you had to use MS Office because everybody ELSE used MS Office. MS was an island, isolated from everybody. But that was OK, because it was a big island and almost everybody lived on it - in fact, they were trapped on it.

But now they're not such a big island, and there's a lot of people living elsewhere. And there's all these annoying people building bridges between the two so the people living on MS's island can freely leave it. Multi-platform software like OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Public standards like XHTML, PDF, and ODF.

Nobody has to live on MS's island if they don't want to. MS can peddle FUD about how dangerous the bridges are and how undesireable life outside of their island is as much as they like, they can't stop people from crossing the bridges and seeing that it's a lot better away from their island.

Their only hope is to stop threatening people, stop acting like their island is as secure as it always was, and make it instead an island where people actually want to live.

Sun is one of MS' business partners. They've been through the exact "Linux is eating away at our customer base" situation as MS is having right now. They made the right choices and their customer base is growing again. Linux is now a valuable ally instead of an enemy.

MS could learn a lot from their example. Question is, will they?