After spending a few months relying on Linux for protection, Microsoft appears to have made its way back to homegrown code.

Since August, requests to microsoft.com had the look and feel of being served up by open source code. Microsoft enlisted hosting provider Akamai's Linux server army to fend off a disheartening number of DDoS attacks, worms and the like. According to Netcraft, however, Microsoft returned to itself on Nov. 26.

(You may recall some other odd fumbling with the windowsupdate.microsoft.com site.)

How interesting is all of this? Well, not terribly.

There is comic value in Microsoft swallowing some pride to keep microsoft.com up with the help of Linux caching servers. Grizzle, grumble, why must we be associated with this cancerous free software collective?

In the end, Microsoft could not let the association go on forever. As an IT leader, it's important to at least give the appearance your products are good enough for the masses. So, it's back to Windows 2003 Server and IIS 6.0 again. ®