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Microsoft Keeps Eye on Open-Source Prize
Rob writes to tell us that at the recent Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Microsoft's director of platform technology strategy, Bill Hilf, outlined why Microsoft is staying involved with open source. From the article: "Challenges of working [coopetively] in the open-source space include the balance between competing and cooperating with a rival, he said. Perception also is a 'big' challenge for the software giant. 'In many regards, the Microsoft open-source story lends itself to a great metaphor of David and Goliath,' he said. 'That is a challenge over perception.'"
Should read "Microsoft Keeps Eye on Open-Source PR"
Microsoft views open source through the lens of "coopetition from commercial and open-source strategies at the same time," Hilf said.
Did he mean to say "through the lens of a high-powered rifle's croshairs"?
never a truer word spoken... Microsoft loves to coopt software... hates giving back though... just absolutely loves the BSD license
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A large blue screen saying there was a critical error at 0x000000 is a 'A challenge over perception.' as well? /had to be done.
Coopetition, or simultaneously cooperating and competing with rivals, has long been Microsoft's broader business strategy.
So that's what they call it. Translating the doublespeak, is that a euphemism for "Buying the companies whose IP you need, and crushing everyone else" perchance?
Oh no... it's the future.
"Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer."
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Perception also is a 'big' challenge for the software giant.
Indeed. Many people "perceive" their software to be bloated and buggy.
This guy's the limit!
Umm... I dont thin the EU wanted the source at all, they wanted proper specs and documentation for the SMB protocol (?). MS was trying to avoid giving anyone anything useful by licensing the Windows source for lots of cash and a very restrictive lisence that would not actually let FOSS use any knowledge gained from the source. On top of that, there is still no good specs/docs for SMB, which was what was asked for in the beginning.
Perception of Microsoft: "There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft." - Bill Gates
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I've heard that David and Goliath metaphor before... ...except that usually Micro$oft is the Goliath.
I can't belive that they DARE to try to use David vs Goliath as a metaphor in THEIR FAVOR!
Poor little beaten-down monopoly....
Ever wonder why they have a problem with their public perception?
"On the desktop, we have a strategic win today (monopoly). We must keep the desktop." - Presentation, Microsoft Executive Staff Retreat, May 10, 1990
"We are engaged in a FUD campaign to let the press know about some of the bugs. We'll provide info a few bugs at a time to stretch it out." - Brad Silverberg, July 22, 1991
"Objectives: FUD DR DOS with every editorial contact made." - MS-DOS 6 PR Plan, November 1992
"look what znix is doing! cut those fuckers off." - Brad Silverberg, May 19, 1992
"Five minutes after any agreement is signed with Microsoft, they'll be thinking of how to violate the agreement. They're predators. They crush their competition. They crush new ideas. They stifle innovation. That's what they do." - Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, Quoted by Matthew Szulik at a U.S. Senate Hearing, Dec 12, 2001
Could be their corporate conduct.
Developers: We can use your help.
Ultimately, Microsoft is coming round to the fact that it cannot write away the open source movement. There is a very popular saying : If a group of weak sticks are bound together, the combined strength can be even more than a single stout stick.
GNU/Linux and Open Source softwares are like the multiple weak sticks which have come together to become very strong. And microsoft is realising that it is not going to be a cake walk any longer.
The end users are the one who are going to benefit from the whole thing.
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"Making money matters. More importantly, making money sustainably matters. Being a successful commercial software company is very hard ... staying successful is even harder," Hilf said. "Developing coopetition strategies is a great way for growth in this environment and we're seeing that today."
He must be a director / big fish. He tells something, everybody knows and still gets public.
there are 99,700 google results for the word coopetition, looks like it is becoming quite a popular new word.
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MS to stick their head in the sand and hope OSS will go away? "Know your enemy better than you know yourself."
The BSD Licence allows for code to be used for proprietary software w/o the need to redistribute ala GPL, one of the reasons BSD is seen as more 'corporate friendly'. Plenty of history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_Micro soft_Windows and if you're in Windows you can see traces of BSD throughout. One example, drop to a CMD line in Win32 and...
c:\> strings.exe c:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.exe | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
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Microsoft views open source through the lens of "coopetition from commercial and open-source strategies at the same time," Hilf said.
MS had always competed with IBM. IBM is seen has very good to Open source. IBM still makes profit benefiting from open source. MS may be thinking along the same lines and I think they are not able to come up with a viable business plan of how to make use of open source movement that do not hurt their bottomline of MS OS and MS Office.
Just using the conference to confuse, confound and inject a little fud ..
..
... What would actually happen if we were in that environment?"
..
..)
"I personally don't believe tech support calls for a commodity product is sustainable,"
No one ever made money out of Open Source
"In many regards, the Microsoft open-source story lends itself to a great metaphor of David and Goliath," "That is a challenge over perception"
One way of meeting the challenge is to hire on the best out of Open Source taking them out of the Gene pool.
"Microsoft has benefited from OSS, has participated in OSS projects, and feels that OSS will continue to have an important role in the ecosystem"
Pronouncments like this also give the impression that MS is in some way directing the development of the Open Source model. That and the use of the word 'open' at every opportunity. It's called stealing mindshare.
"We have an impact from what people call the ripple effect
We hope to gain some control over that environment by engaging with it. He also had this to say previously
When we think about criteria around interoperability, we will have a great foundation in Longhorn to help exercise the criteria around that."
Open Source does not equal Open Standards.
But MS Open Standards does not actually mean the protocols and interfaces are in the public domain does it. A royalty free license is still tied to Microsoft. But keep on repeating the word 'open'.
"Linux is somewhat inferior to commercial offerings when considered as a general-purpose desktop operating system"
I'm sorry Bill, but you just lost your credibility. (Sent from a SuSE Desktop. No viruses, no blue screens etc
http://fudwatcher.blogspot.com/
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did anyone happen to notice the entire .net framework is easily readable? reflector anyone? what wasn't leads right down to win32 and most of that was already leaked a few years ago. jeez guys its just code no magic here we've all seen it all. besides they have done more complete api's, sdk's and documentation than anyone else can manage.
they don't go out of there way to make it hard to develop on there platforms or they'd just be another mac and you wouldn't even care to flame them on there software pratices. fear is a powerful force.
it means limited co-operation between competitors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition
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Ha, if the EU wants decent specs and someone who understands how SMB actually works they better look to someone else besides MS.
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Also, there are 126,000 hits for "omgwtfbbq," but I'm not going to start using that either. ;-p
There's also the problem of the "observer effect," which is potentially changing an environment being part of it. "This is the important part for Microsoft," he said. "We have an impact from what people call the ripple effect ... What would actually happen if we were in that environment?"
You'd really mess it up comes to mind!
One of the things MS fails to see is that the Open Source movement has lit a fire under the whole computing industry and opened doors for many who have great ideas. The part I like best about the open source movement is the rush of new talent on the scene that would otherwise be stuck in a very Orwellian state if it had not been set free.
MS seems to be facing quite a dilemma where they have to be very careful to not make too much sense when addressing open source, much like a politician who has to gain the confidence of those he will later betray for money over principles. This may explain why a smart, educated man would sound so illiterate and senseless while addressing the open source supporters in the room. Surely, ramblings like we see in TFA must be absent when he reports back to HQ. Otherwise, I would be compelled to warn all MS employees not to drink the water at the office.
I lost my sig...
Of course Microsoft will keep an eye on open source. I think open source is of huge benefit to large commercial software companies. Here's why.
The open source movement provides a huge ecosystem of software projects which a large company like Microsoft can monitor. When a large company sees a successful open source project, they know there is value to what the project is doing. A level of demand is thus established. Then, they can do some research and try determine whether or not there is a successful business model which can be built around the project, i.e., whether or not the project can be made to generate cash. If it can, then they can decide an appropriate strategy to profit from it, either through purchasing the company or its talent, or simply duplicating the company's work.
There are few other industries where so many talented people are willing to work for free.
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M$ actually doesn't know anything about it's own SMB protocol. That's probably why the information they gave up was confusing and why network drives don't really work well.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Unless the license is GPL. MS is just blowing smoke,or is that inhaling ?
Perhaps there is another reason why they were so reluctant to release any documentation or specification...because there is none. I have seen many times now in my software career proprietary pieces of code that have been running for years using an unknown binary protocol amongst themselves that was written by one or two developers who worked for the company in question years ago and never wrote anything down. Nobody even realized this was a problem until there were change requests that could not be made because the expertise to complete the requests had long since moved on. It has been my experience that written documentation is the exception rather than the rule in closed source projects. In fact, the only documentation that is guaranteed to exist is the original source code and sometimes even that cannot be found.