Microsoft recently announced the first of Microsoft 365 App, Microsoft Teams for the Linux community. The team promised to deliver high quality collaboration experience for the open source community through Teams and made it available by releasing it in .rpm and .deb package.
We have already seen Microsoft’s ‘love’ towards Linux. With Windows Subsystem for Linux and allowing different Linux flavors through it, Microsoft lured the developers with a Linux-esque experience without dual booting Linux or leaving Windows altogether. And now comes a native Linux App from a company whose CEO at some point of time called Linux a cancer.
How do you take it? Is it another EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish)? Is Microsoft trying to kill its competition i.e. Slack altogether? On a positive note, is Microsoft genuinely supporting Linux platform?
Note : These are all my views and I would be more than happy to read yours in the comment section.
Lets me start with the fear. Is it another Microsoft’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish step? For those of you who are not aware, here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
“Embrace, extend, and extinguish” (EEE), also known as “embrace, extend, and exterminate”, is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Personally, I don’t think there is any danger to Linux and any of the Linux distributions.
I’m also inclined to believe Microsoft do not have any significant risk from Slack. Applications like Slack, Teams etc are mainly aimed for developers and at workplaces. With the very limited use of Linux distributions on the desktop in workplace, Microsoft always has its Windows platform to promote anything. Workplaces heavily use Windows Operating System and it’s just left out to the choice of use Skype, Teams or Slack. Moreover, Microsoft teams can be run in browser and boosts a larger user base than slack.
Slack was not happy though. At least not with the uncanny similarity of Microsoft’s Ad to Slacks’.
The positive side : Are we seeing more proprietary applications?
The official announcement page for Teams received a lot of comments from Linux users who were quite happy with the release! It’s a nice application and has a big user base which is ever growing with MS pushing it these days. Just because you are using Linux, you don’t need to force everyone to use say Slack.
The important part is this. The fact that a money making company extended its product ‘natively’ to Linux is a booster. We may see some more native applications in coming future from Microsoft and other big players. Adobe has always stayed away from Linux desktop and a native Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator coming to Linux would be a great thing. Who knows!
And, there is always a mixed reaction. Some people just don’t want to touch anything which has Microsoft written on it while others feel it’s a win considering another software is available and others may even follow the route!
Slack later published a full page open letter congratulating Microsoft. I believe we should take it the same way.
As a Linux user, is Microsoft releasing a native Linux application excited you? Or, are you paranoid with the Windows Subsystem for Linux giving a subset of Linux feature in Windows 10, thus limiting the need of a Linux environment?
Let me know in the comments. The weekend has just started and what’s better to have a discussion with you.
