Larry Ellison in a dream world

Proving only that he hasn’t talked to an actual software developer in a coon’s age, Larry Ellison predicts that Linux is going to eventually eat Microsoft for lunch. On the desktop, except for a few dedicated followers of the Church of Apple and Unix-lovin’ software developers, Microsoft owns this space and will for a long time.

In developer land, having been recently reintroduced to the ins and out of Microsoft development, I’m reminded how differently Unix developers and Microsoft developers approach software development. If Unix development philosophy is small pieces loosely joined, Microsoft’s philosophy is big chunks tightly coupled. Microsoft developers aren’t going to suddenly jump ship to a completely different platform and way of developing…there’s a lot of friction and inertia there (not to mention Microsoft’s considerable marketing efforts) that will tend to prevent that.