Ina Fried of CNET asked Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer that very question, and elicited an interesting reply:

Fried: “If I ask you who is Microsoft’s biggest competitor now, who would it be?”
Ballmer: “Open…Linux. I don’t want to say open source. Linux, certainly have to go with that…“

I wonder what “Open …” word Steve really had in mind, before his built-in danger alert kicked in? Fried probed more, and Ballmer reeled off a list of competitors in different areas:

Ballmer: “…If you ask Steve Elop (president of Microsoft’s Business Division), who replaces Jeff Raikes, I just think he would say Open Office, potentially Google. And certainly Kevin Johnson (might add) Apple and Linux“

I suppose it’s ok for Steve to call us Open Office rather than OpenOffice.org - I dare say OpenOffice.org Community members have called Microsoft by other names from time to time. But it’s nice to have confirmation from the man at the top of Microsoft that we’re the people that keep at least one of his senior people awake at night. Not bad for a team of volunteers up against the worlds’ biggest software company.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 7:14 am and is filed under Open-source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.