Microsoft's Biggest Threat - Google or Open Source?

Glyn Moody writes "Google always plays down suggestions that there's any looming clash of the titans between itself and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the search giant is pushing open source in every way it can. They're contributing directly by contributing code to projects and employing top hackers like Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison and Guido van Rossum, and indirectly through the $60 million fees it pays Mozilla, its Summer of Code scheme and various open source summits held at its offices. Google+OSS: could this be the killer combination that finally breaks Microsoft?"

Comments

ibm, ms and google

[theheadlessrabbit]

I'm waiting for the day when Microsoft begins to wither and die under its own weight, and at the last minute, pulls an IBM, investing heavily in OSS to keep itself going more cost effectively.

Then MS will suddenly become a much loved company around here, 'cause 'round these parts, supporting OSS = /. love

Then, in a need to fill the void left by Microsoft, Google will suddenly become the big bad guy. All of us on Slashdot will be praising Microsoft and hoping they can take down the big evil google.

or we could agree that both of these companies fulfil a certain niche that the other company cannot, and we need them both. one company provides employment for countless nerds due to its buggy software, while the other company helps those nerds find things, (like porn)

They are not in direct competition with each other.

Neither

[Nebu]

To be a threat to Microsoft, you'd have to be a potential barrier to a large amount of future profits. Google is basically two things: (1) A search engine and (2) a wildcard, pouring money into almost everything. Microsoft is not strongly invested into the search area, so (1) is not a threat to it. In fact, Microsoft is more of a threat to Google in that respect, not because Microsoft is doing better than Google, but because Google is the "established champion", and Microsoft (among others, like Yahoo) are the encroachers who are trying to steal that title. As for (2), there's always a chance that Google will discover/invent the next big paradigm shift that changes everything, but then again, so can any other startup, or even maybe big companies like Apple or IBM, or hell even Microsoft themselves (the "Microsoft Surface" looks pretty sweet, for example, though I'm not sure it'll be big enough to be a paradigm shift). It's getting hit by a lightning bolt: a possibility, but not something you worry about from day to day.

OSS is a bigger threat, mainly because of free office suites, and to a lesser degree Apache. Most of Microsoft's money comes from OSes, then from Office, and then services associated around server technology like .NET, IIS, etc. Honestly, I don't think Microsoft is very worried about Linux on the desktop. I find Microsoft hard to read in terms of OS on the server side, so it's possible they may actually be *WORRIED* (e.g. managers thinking "Hey, if we don't do something, Linux'll win"), but I'm not sure. I *DO* know that Microsoft is getting anxious about their Office software, which is their second biggest cashcow. It's not any-one particular alternative that they are afraid of (e.g. OpenOffice), but that there seems to be a growing awareness of alternatives that they're worried about. I suspect they're aware that this particular type of software is about to become commoditized and are looking at appropriate strategies (e.g. moving to software-as-a-service, via that Office Live thing).

For the server side technology, Microsoft doesn't directly make money off of these (they give away .NET, IIS, etc. for free), but rather from surrounding services (e.g. certification, training, etc.) and products (e.g. Visual Studio). Note that this is the same business model that OSS software later adapted (give the software away for free, make money on the services), which is one of the reasons why I find comments about Microsoft being anti-OSS to be a form of over-simplified ignorance. Microsoft is a corporation, not a fundamentalistic ideal. If they can make more money through OSS than closed-source-software, they'll switch in a heartbeat. In the particular case of Apache vs IIS, it's like the Google scenario: Apache isn't a "threat", because Microsoft isn't strongly invested into that market -- Apache is -- and Microsoft is attempting to grow into that market, rather than to hold onto it (and they seem to be quite successful, much more so than they have been against Google: IIS adoption is growing very rapidly).

So what *ARE* Microsoft's biggest threats? Well, one of them is a little bit obvious when you look at their history, and what has caused them to lose the greatest amounts of money: Government and law. Microsoft is in a difficult position there, because their desktop business centers around pushing new and improved versions of their old product. Consumers, before they buy the next version of Windows, want to know what are the new and improved features, and if there aren't enough new and improved features, they won't spend the money to upgrade. However, if Microsoft adds too many new and improved features (e.g. by bundling a media player with their OS), they may get in trouble with certain governments (namely the British and US ones).

Software design jokes aside, Microsoft isn't dumb. They're already predicting, in the long term (10-20 years) that all of software will eventually become commoditized, and they have plans in place to move entirely in t

The Biggest Threat: Educated Customers

[IronClad]

The most lucrative of Microsoft's business models seem to have been based on the exploitation of customer and regulatory naivete in a new market. If this is true, and as long as Microsoft doesn't really change, their biggest threat is to have there market grow up, mature, and educate themselves about what has been going on.

Both FOSS and Google help that education process, to different extents, and in different ways. So both are threats. Which is the biggest immediate threat? Whichever one manages to get its message into the dense brains of middle managers first. It's a hard call to make from here.

FOSS's advanced messages (freedom, collaboration, transparency, technical education, etc.) will take a long time to be understood. The FOSS "Free & Cheap Stuff" message is already catching on, but it's not enough of an education in its own right to undo Microsoft's abuses. FOSS supporters who work to thoroughly school their organizations and contacts in the issues do make a big impact.

But I think Google is in a somewhat better position to be the immediate threat. Why? It has a greater power to punch simple "soundbyte" messages, one at a time, into the psyche of of the huddled masses yearning to breath free. I don't know if they're going to do that or not, but they could, and that's the threat.

It's close to the topic of politics -- I don't like soundbytes but recognize their power over the naive. Political discourse would be different if the electorate were uniformly wise and educated on the issues. Not the way it should be, but more the way I think things are, and just my opinion.

Re:Google is OSS

[darkfire5252]

A tad cynical perhaps, but you can bet if they thought there was more money in closed source than open, they'd go that way.

More than that, now that they're a publicly traded corporation the board can be sued by investors if Google knew that closed source was more profitable but chose not to pursue that route. Public corporations (unfortunately) have the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value, and they are legally obligated to do so. Theoretically, a more socially oriented government could require corporations to have goals other than this, but this won't happen for a loong time, if ever.