Attendees of LinuxWorld next week will see a new executive face in the Microsoft Corp. booth.

Martin Taylor — who is two weeks into his job as Microsoft platform strategist — is Microsoft's new point man on Linux. And he says he has a new plan for how to help Microsoft compete better with open-source.

Read "Microsoft Taps New Open-Source, Linux Strategist"

Taylor, a 10-plus-year Microsoft veteran, has held a variety of posts at Microsoft. He started his career working on programs for resellers and integrators in Microsoft's Washington, D.C., office. He also worked in the company's New York office for a couple of years, managing Microsoft's organizational customer unit team. For another two years, he served as the general manager of Microsoft Caribbean, which is based in Puerto Rico.

Taylor rose through the ranks, and for the past 18 months was director of business strategy for CEO Steve Ballmer. His latest mission was helping Microsoft develop a way to measure customer satisfaction with Microsoft partners.

In his platform-strategist role, Taylor succeeds Peter Houston, senior director of Microsoft's Windows Server Strategies, as chief Linux watcher.

"Pete was more focused on server, but I'm more cross-group focused, and focused on the whole Microsoft software stack," Taylor said in an interview with Microsoft Watch this week. "And I'm also interested in some of the non-technical reasons that make customers move away from Microsoft."

Taylor jokes that his colleagues have nicknamed him "Joe Friday," after the fictional sergeant on "Dragnet" who focused on "just the facts, ma'am."

"Because some of this (Linux vs. Windows) discussion has become borderline religious, we want to tell our customers just the facts" from here on out, he says.

So, rather than continuing to stir the Linux vs. Windows pot with barbs and inflammatory rhetoric, Taylor says he is planning to turn his team's attentions on demonstrating the value perspective of Windows vis-à-vis open-source software.

(Microsoft CEO Ballmer seemingly didn't mind fanning the Linux flames at last week's Financial Analyst Meeting, however. Ballmer repeated the old innovation-vs.-commoditization and patent/intellectual-property arguments that Microsoft executives have repeatedly leveled against open source over the past couple of years. He also took some new potshots at Linux backer IBM during his remarks at the day-long summit.)

See "Ballmer Still Tilting At Linux" For More

Taylor is making it his job to unearth and fund (if necessary) new studies that will highlight Microsoft's advantages in areas such as security, feature-completeness and total cost of ownership.

In addition, expect to hear a lot more about "integrated innovation" from Redmond in the coming months, he says. Integrated innovation, in Microsoft parlance, refers to the idea of "the Microsoft platform," or stack, which is comprised of the Windows Server System family of products, plus the emerging Office Server System and other evolving families of Microsoft technologies that are layered on top.

"We are going to be talking about our entire stack," Taylor explains. "Linux is only piece of that stack."

Microsoft also is dissecting what makes Linux tick in its own Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC). The EEC is focused primarily on helping Microsoft customers with deployments of new Microsoft software. But Microsoft also has built a simulated Linux environment at the EEC, Taylor says, where Microsoft developers can experiment with open-source operating systems, firewalls, scripting environments and the like.

"It was a great learning experience for us," Taylor says. And the lab is helping Microsoft analyze areas where open source is weak and where Microsoft should redouble its efforts—such as in single-sign-on technology, Taylor says.

LinuxWorld attendees won't see fruits of these efforts at the show, however. Microsoft is planning to tout its Services for Unix 3.0 product, shared-source program and Web Matrix hobbyist tool in its booth, as it has done for the past couple of LinuxWorld events, says Taylor.