After reading through this post and linked articles, I went ‘Hmm..’ and remembered one of the recent Paul Graham’s articles ‘Hiring is Obsolete‘ where he mentions that:
There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy.
Than I thought that if Microsoft is to buy Red Hat, there will probably be a huge wave of Linux people starting up companies and making all sorts of things that Microsoft might be interested in after Red Hat purchase. But Microsoft will probably be busy fighting a bunch of anti-trust cases.
While I understand that the whole thing is a rumor, it feeds some interesting thinking…