Old foes warm to the battle again

For the third day in a row, Microsoft`s Albie Bester, platform strategy manager at Microsoft SA, could be seen at the Sandton Convention Centre, the locale of Novell`s Brainshare Africa 2004 conference.

Unlike 94.7`s "The Fugitive", who reportedly skulked around outside the centre on the second day, Bester congenially posed for photographs and paid his registration fee at the front desk when ITWeb checked in for the keynote on the last day.

Asked why he was at Brainshare, Bester gently teased the opposition by saying Novell "always supports our conferences, so it`s time we did the same". But if more cutting taunts from Novell managers and customers are to be taken seriously, the real nature of Bester`s visit may be a "recce" in preparation of a simmering battle with a growing enemy.

Microsoft and the open source movement are increasingly strident in their appeal to customers to switch platforms or stick to what they have. Bester is currently being quoted in the media in support of the Get the Facts campaign, the latest in the company`s ongoing offensive against the open source software (OSS) threat to its lucrative software business. Mark Shuttleworth, a champion of the OSS movement, recently launched the Go Open Source campaign.

Stafford Masie, MD of Novell SA, comments: "I like that campaign [Get the Facts] of theirs. It saves me a lot of marketing dollars. They`re doing more to spread the word on Linux than we could do ourselves."

Novell got its nose bloodied in the nineties when Microsoft took almost all market share from the revered NetWare platform, and popularised Novell`s directories innovation with Active Directory. With the resurgence of Novell and Linux today, the talk is again aggressive among Novell`s staff.

And customers are joining in. Farouk Docrat of the University of KwaZulu/Natal presented a skit on the final day with the theme of designing a good network and IT system. Using a cooking metaphor, Docrat "poured" and added many Novell elements, and finally a "pinch" of Microsoft. "Not too much," he said. "You can`t afford too much, and if you don`t watch it, it gets messy in there."

Philip Watkins, IT manager of the Ethekwini Electricity Department (Durban), referred to Microsoft as "that other thing", and pointed to Microsoft`s "predatory business practices", which he said included extending open standards and only making them accessible to those who pay a fee.

Marketing videos throughout the three days of Brainshare showed Microsoft`s signature butterfly alternately swatted by a Penguin, leaving a blood stain the shape and colour of Novell`s red "N", and spewed out as a "bug" by a virus checker on a PC.

Against a background of US Congressional appeals from both sides and high-stakes consumer campaigns, this "good-natured banter" between the two camps may yet escalate into the fiercest ICT war of all time.