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Any Linux box Microsoft sees installed and securely running is one less Windows NT/2000/XP sale, and the publicly-traded Microsoft can't have that. If Linux wins on servers, perhaps desktops will be next. It isn't just the loss of Windows sales that bothers Microsoft. The company sells products on top of products. While the OS is the base, Microsoft pitches applications, services, and development tools. A lot is at stake, so Microsoft is willing to do battle over each and every server.

A recent memo instructed Microsoft people in the field to seek out any and all Linux boxes and then firmly discuss these boxes with IT. Employees should walk around the data centers, ask about the various boxes, and once alternatives to Windows are discovered, they should make the pitch.

Microsoft will argue that Windows is a better way to downsize or consolidate servers. The company will also argue, and this could be a tough one, that Windows is less expensive to operate than Linux.

And the Winner Is

Microsoft likes to win (or maybe it just really hates to lose). Its latest battle is over Web services where .Net goes up against SunOne, a Java-based alternative. Recently we brought you the results of a survey where SunOne gave .Net a serious spanking. So how did Microsoft bounce back and give Sun a thrashing? Apparently by rigging the vote.

An e-mail was sent around that included a link to the voting site. Guess where that came from. The link was labeled "Please stop and vote for .Net!" -- and a Titanic-size boatload of votes came from the Microsoft.com domain.

It would be easy to blame Microsoft for this transgression. But I seriously doubt that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have time to vote for .Net or to tell employees to do the same. But they are indirectly responsible. Things like this happen because of the corporate culture, where winning is everything. There is also a culture that rewards cleverness and technical expertise, and there was a fair amount of technology that went into the rigging. For instance, scripts were discovered for posting multiple votes.

My concern is that when things like this happen, Microsoft doesn't take a strong public position. When Microsoft employees used Windows voting features that were unavailable to other competitors, the company never publicly hunted down the wrong doers and disciplined them, which made it seem okay for them to bend the rules. And until the company makes it clear that this type of behavior is not tolerated, this exact type of behavior will continue.

How Bad Was It?

How bad was the dot-com meltdown? We've all heard stories of twenty-somethings losing millions of dollars, but what do you get when you add up all those losses? I'm not sure if anyone has done that math, but someone did calculate how much cash U.S. companies will write off this quarter for bad Internet acquisitions, and that number is a relatively staggering $1 trillion. Even as dot-coms started to falter, companies were still paying too much to buy other companies. AOL Time Warner, for instance, is writing off $60 billion. That's an awful lot of free CDs.