Methods used by Microsoft include: Using FUD, proxies and paid disparager's of Linux, vague statements regarding patents and making attempts to split the FOSS community through agreements with distributions.

The FUD campaign conducted by Microsoft over many years has been multi-pronged but to those within the FOSS community mostly ineffective. The campaign, designed to discourage people from moving to Linux has not gone well for Microsoft given Linux's rate of growth.

If Microsoft have patents over Linux Technology as they attempt to imply, then why are they conducting their FUD campaign? They could, with greater ease go to court, disclose their patents and obtain compensation for their alleged intellectual property and end the ambiguity or they could provide a list of their patents that purportedly cover Linux technology and allow the community to remove the items in dispute, yet instead they decide to conduct a campaign of FUD against Linux and the FOSS community.

Could it be that they know their patent claims are dubious at best? or perhaps it is due to what would happen should they go to court? Lets think about this for a moment. If Microsoft were to go to court against the FOSS community what would be the most likely repercussions? Microsoft is already disliked in many fields and many nations, are they worried about further damaging their image? are they worried about anti-trust issues in the USA and elsewhere? are they worried about what happened when SCO tried their litigation approach against Linux where the FOSS community banding together against SCO and it's supporters? I think they are very worried.

Microsoft's recent agreement with Novell is, from everything I have seen, yet another attempt by Microsoft to disrupt and fracture the Linux community. Unfortunately for now it looks as though it has worked with respect to SUSE as many people have stated they would be now moving away from SUSE or not selecting it in favor of other distributions. Can anyone really believe that Microsoft would wish to sell Linux to their customers?

Microsoft has a major problem when it comes to innovation. While new products they release have new features quite often these features have been available in competitors products for quite some time or they don't significantly improve the product providing an incentive to upgrade to the newest version. As a result many Microsoft customers are not upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Office or Windows, instead they simply use what they have as it is "good enough" or they elect to install an alternative offering such as Firefox (which has had tabbed browsing at least two years before Microsoft decided to implement that feature and release IE7) or OpenOffoce.org's suite as it is free and for most users does what they require with regards to a word processor and spreadsheet.