First Steve Ballmer was scratching his head about Android; now he's murmuring about the possibility of using open source components in Internet Explorer. Small wonder so many of us are scratching our heads, too, but there's a consistency in there, amazingly.

Every single one of Ballmer's (and Microsoft's) recent moves vis-a-vis open source come down to two things: a) it's OK as long as we can make it serve Microsoft in some fashion, and b) it's OK as long as it's not Linux. It's not open source per se that's the big enemy for them any more, but a specific open source platform that they worry most about.

Small wonder the talk behind the scenes is that Windows 7 could ship to manufacturers as early as this coming summer, as a pre-emptive strike against Linux-powered netbooks. If people run Firefox on it instead of IE and use Gmail instead of Outlook (or even Windows Live Mail), fine with them. Just as long as Microsoft can provide the sandbox to play in -- and, by extension, the clouds to compute in as well (which they're also working hard on as we speak).

Ballmer's offhand comments about open source being "interesting" -- along with "Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that" -- sound more like a toss-off than anything else, a piece of meat thrown to the crowd hungry for something to chew on. For all I know, that could mean they would eventually write a version of IE that has a pluggable rendering engine, one where you could swap in your choice of MS's engine, Mozilla, Webkit, or what-have-you. Nice for developers, maybe, but given that IE's been eaten alive by the competition at this point, why bother?

Ultimately, I'm not surprised by this. It's scarcely out of gamut for the New Microsoft to say yes to something open ... as long as that something doesn't start with the letter L.

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