Xandros dance with M$ turns smooch

[Alpine]

Email protocols as deadly embrace

MICROSOFT'S LATEST Linux distributor thrall Xandros will fall further under the Volish spell to integrate email and collaboration products with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

Following the lead of Novell and Linspire, Xandros earlier agreed to cooperate with Microsoft in order to gain "patent protection" for its Linux customers along with Microsoft's promises for future cooperation on interoperability. This extension of their partnership to server protocols seems to follow through with intentions on the interoperability front.

Xandros recently acquired Scalix, a Linux vendor of email and workgroup collaboration software. It will now turn Scalix's development efforts toward producing its own Linux server implementations of Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync Protocol and Outlook Exchange Transport Protocol 2007. Integration with Microsoft's email protocols will let Scalix Linux server customers provide mobile users with synchronization of Volish email and workgroup data.

An observer might hesitate to predict trouble ahead for such a new partnership, but only a moment's pause will suffice. After all, this is Microsoft we're talking about.

Xandros seems blithely ignorant of the Vole's record in its past partnerships. This won't be the first time Microsoft has led a competitor down the garden path. IBM with OS/2 and Stac with disk compression spring immediately to mind, and surely there have been others not so easily remembered.

Microsoft doesn't build software that's thoroughly designed up front and tightly coded to precise specifications. It builds what it builds, puts the alpha grade product on the market, lets users test it for a couple of product cycles, and ends up with a product that mostly sort of works by about the third iteration, which by the way is often quite "evolved" from the original product. Microsoft calls this process "innovation."

Unless its Linux software developers work very closely with Microsoft's, Xandros might have to face protocols that drift away from their specifications and thus find itself forced to play catch-up on the same well-worn treadmill previously trod into exhaustion by Lotus and WordPerfect. It's possible that this dalliance might end in tears for Xandros.

The INQuirer