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Microsoft Acknowledges Open Source As a Bigger Threat Than Google
ruphus13 takes us to ZDNet for an analysis of comments by Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, about how open source is "much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business strategy than Google. Ozzie also spoke about the future of Microsoft's search technology, which will develop with or without Yahoo. There is a related interview at OStatic with several Microsoft employees about how they view and interact with the open source community. The head of Microsoft's global open source and Linux team is quoted saying:
"The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially. Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations. Subsequently the projects fall out of use. This is unnecessary waste that would often be prevented by making it easy for companies to pay the developers directly. I think it's important to solve this so that the sustainability of open source projects is improved."
So, microsoft says "Free software might lead to lesser sales" and "Paid Alternatives not as attractive as Free ones!"
... and what would be a bigger threat to Microsoft - Alternative OS or ... adsense. Hmmm...
I'd say they're right.. but I'm also surprised that anyone has to say anything at all...
AND, well, Google isn't distributing alternative OSes, and the FOSS community IS
This never happens with commercial software.
Nothing is stopping companies from paying the developers. What is this guy's point exactly. And it's not like a company can't add a developer to their payroll to pick up dead OSS projects. Oh wait he's a M$ troll. It's FUD. It says "Please Mr. Company, don't use the OSS product, because it might get dropped, and then where will you be?" And "Please Mr. Developer, don't work on OSS projects, because people are just taking advantage of you." Gagh!
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Ray Ozzie: "I think it's important to solve this so that the sustainability of open source projects is improved."
I'm touched by this new warmer, fuzzier Microsoft! Now that it's "helped" the commercial software industry, creating a level playing field by bulldozing everybody else's buildings, it can turn its attention to "helping" the struggling open-source world. Welcome, new open-source overlords! May the innovations continue!
No, Ray, I don't see this is as a problem. You are seeing problems where none exist. If a lot of people use an open source project, someone will step in and maintain it, sooner or later.
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MS is a business first and last. They just happen to extort their revenue from software. A thief will look at the Buddha and see only pockets.
Contentment is the greatest wealth
- Sukhavagga Dhammapada
Contentment is the goal behind all goals.
And as if closed Microsoft products don't "subsequently fall out of use." Look at Vista. We wasted a lot of effort testing this pig. We're skipping it. I'm sure more than one Softie got paid for working on Vista. Blaming disuse on FOSS is bogus.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
OS developers are not idiots - they KNOW that they are working for free (simplification, I know, there are exceptions, but it's not important now) and they wouldn't be if they didn't want to. If they do - that means they're just fine with that.
Oh, and note that the guy is speaking "open source" - but there's no word of "free software", that makes up quite a bit of Open Source and explains all the aspects of getting paid very well.
I call FUD.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
"Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially."
Yet again they've missed the point. Some of us developers don't develop for money - we develop for fun/to help the community/geek points. I'm not sure I'd actually want to get paid for the software I write - when something's a hobby, it can be enjoyed at whatever pace you like, but if I was getting paid for it, those who were paying me would feel annoyed if I went and watched a film in an evening instead of developing the software they now consider to have paid for. And there are many times I'd like to go out in an evening instead of sitting in front of my laptop watching GDB tell me I've segfaulted
It appears that yet again, Microsoft cannot look past the monetry value of people and software - for those who haven't read it, The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is a good read, and covers this precise point in great depth.
They want "software as a service?" How about SERVICE as a service?
So far, Microsoft has been pretty successful "printing money" by creating license keys (in another state so they don't have to pay taxes in their own state). We've all been following the gradual push for software as a service with dread that, so far, hasn't gained much traction. So not only are they interested in printing money, they want to print money with an expiration date. Meanwhile, for this and many other reasons, people are looking elsewhere for substitute technologies.
There is plenty of room for Microsoft to earn money, though. The name is still very well known and respected when it comes to information technology... some people even trust the name still. The only reason I can imagine Microsoft may want to abstain from moving more into the services arena is the wrath of all their "partners" out there providing services based on their software. (Though I have yet to see Microsoft being afraid or reluctant to screw 'partners.') But the reality of the OSS threat is that service providers are gradually looking at F/OSS solutions as an alternative to Microsoft's costly licenses. (Their service income remains about the same while the customer spends a LOT less.)
The MPAA/RIAA may have been rather successful at having laws written in their favor, but then again, there doesn't seem to be an alternative route for people seeking entertainment of similar quality. Software and information technology, on the other hand, has ample alternatives that are growing in interest.
(Interestingly, it is also being realized that Microsoft's tactics are partly responsible for the extremely slim margins on hardware prices forcing OEMs to sell Microsoft licenses to improve their profitability. Reducing this effect could result in better profits on hardware especially when they realize they can charge a premium for F/OSS supported hardware over 'Requires Windows' hardware.)
The government pressures from around the globe against Microsoft seem to be paying off to counteract Microsoft's tactics. It seems that perhaps the original remedy, to break Microsoft up in to smaller operational units, might have been healthier for Microsoft since it would have enabled the units to focus on the quality and marketability of their products. Under their current model, their OS and Office products are being used to keep them going while their other involvements are losing money in order to keep potential competition suppressed. Unfortunately for Microsoft, as they slowly fall, the entire operation will fall at once taking everything and everyone with them.
... then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Gandhi.
The quote from the another article is: "Ozzie said that since many open-source programmers aren't beholden to shareholders they potentially represent a more formidable force in the market." So some one at Microsoft's finally said it, and it's believable from my stand point. What kills big successful companies is generally not poor engineering on the part of the engineers, but the fact that the engineers are beholden to marketing and upper management. Seems to correlate with what we know about the innovator's dilemma doesn't it? You may raise the argument that it's marketing and upper management's job to decide what will sell and what won't, but how many engineers do you know that aren't objective enough to judge their own ideas. An engineers job is to judge with his skills the best course of action in order to make the best product possible. I'm not saying that there doesn't need to be leadership, but I think most companies are to salary heavy where there is no value-add to the product.
Money is the root of all evil?
Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations.
Like Visual Basic or Windows XP? Too bad those projects aren't "open source" so that said corporations could step in and get support elsewhere.
)9TSS
Open source is satisfying for developers because they are doing ~what they like~ and ~what interests them~.
In contrast with fixing bugs for 10 years in a cubicle while listening to feudal management aristocrats squabble, periodically announce their delusional plans for market conquest, and garner obscene bonuses as a reward for their ineffectual nonsense.
Microsaur is unhappy watching a faster, more agile creature eat its eggs.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
So some guy who builds a popular open source software program move on the bigger and better and the project dies? Nope. If it is a popular project anyone can pick up where the last developer left off. What happens if a closed source company with a popular product goes out of business? Or what if the company just decides there is no money in the program they develop, but it is mission critical for you? They do not always make a transition or make the source open so where would people be who depend on these?
One counter-example for Microsoft: Windows XP. RIP.
Redmond's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.
- when you see a title like this, you know that the person hasn't done any development in years and the most he is doing now is Visio (this is MS) and Powerpoint.
"Microsoft has built up a culture of crisis," Ozzie told conference attendees.
- that is one of the problems with many companies, not just MS of-course. I hate this culture of 'crisis'. It's always brought upon yourself. It's in everything. Example: OMG, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE UNLESS WE DELIVER THIS CRAZY PIECE OF WORK BY 2 DAYS FROM NOW. It always happens before weekend, you know, and it was always preventable. It is a management problem but it always ends up being developers' problem. Shortsightedness, that's another name for 'culture of crisis'.
He noted that, unlike Google, many open-source programmers aren't beholden to shareholders.
- many aren't and it's great.
Ozzie said that competing with open source "made Microsoft a much stronger company."
- I doubt it. Taking open source (like parts of BSD, TCP/IP stack etc.) made MS stronger. Being forced to compete with FOSS is tearing MS apart.
Ozzie noted that if a new operating system were designed today, it wouldn't be a single piece of software that operates a single computer. It would be something that could accommodate multiple devices, with the user at the center. That sounds like Live Mesh -- but perhaps he was also hinting about Microsoft's post-Windows, distributed operating system I keep hearing rumors about...
- just what I would expect from an 'arm-chair architect'. Coming up with gimmicks rather than looking at the simplest existing solutions. When ALL devices will have the same instruction set, the same processing speeds, the same amount of memory etc., yeah, then one OS would make sense for those devices. Until that moment each device will have its own simplest OS and to connect devices then all that is necessary is standard approach to networking protocols.
Yahoo was not a strategy unto itself," he said. "It was an accelerator to the ad platform.
,
"We are very, very serious about the online space,"
- of-course you are. Until 1995 MS didn't bother much with the 'internets', Borg's view of it was that there was no money there. MS is a crisis driven company, remember? When there is a crisis (like all of a sudden MS is not within a market where new technology is developing, because they didn't see money in it) then it starts moving it's collective ass. So after looking at Google's success with making money on text-ads delivered within the context of a search query, MS decided it wants to be there too. It's like all those little sushi restaurants that crowd together. I have noticed it, in the area where we live there was very little happening until about 5 years ago, one sushi restaurant opened up. Then within a year 3 more appeared within 50 METERS of each other. That's what MS is - trying to get a cut of that sushi money.
Programming tools that work across a variety of devices. At the very end of his remarks, Ozzie made a passing reference to the need for not just programming tools and services that can accommodate multi-core/many-core systems, but also tools that can work across a variety of devices. He noted that there's a need for development tools for building software that works across multiple devices. A reference to the Live Mesh Software Development Kit (SDK), expected to debut at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in late October? Perhaps....
- my god. I mostly work with Java, sometimes I do some stuff with C/C++, whatever. I hate it when a large corp (BEA for example) pushes their gimmick forward as if it was the next best thing right BEFORE the sliced bread. I am tired of it. I prefer tools that work well in their own space, tools that manipulate source in ways that are
You can't handle the truth.
NO NO NO NO! No more freaking distros.
All we need is Google to fund development of important desktop applications. Improve OpenOffice to match MS Office 2007, improve GIMP to match Photoshop (Better yet, create new, *real* alternative to Photoshop with humanly usable user interface. Create alternative to Exchange that works out of box and can installed by relatively normal people (There are bits and pieces here and there, but most of them are not usable or really hard to install or just Do Not Work. Really working Caldav server please?)
Distros are irrelevant. No more freaking "another different configuration tools"- distro. Gimme the apps!
>The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially.
... but in return he has gained billions of hours worth of developed software without any financial loss. That increases his productivity drastically and thus the demand for his services and his pay.
This is complete bullshit. What is really going on is that free software forces the software market to center around services instead of licensing controls. That might be bad for somebody who wants a global monopoly, but is very nice for those who create and do stuff.
In an open source world, a software engineer may have lost a total monopoly over a work he creates
It is Microsoft who has deprived us of that benefit with their constant licensing fees and constant vendor lock in, not open source.
do you mean Open in the sense they have never shared their Page Rank algorithm with anyone?
That may be the case for many of the smaller (and undeniably useful) open source projects, but it seems like all of the big names ones started out as a commercial or internal project.
Open source to make makes the most sense anywhere a company benefits from having a specific product available enough to spend development effort on it, but where they are unable or unwilling to bring it to market as a commercial offering.
Sun gets a lot out of having OpenOffice exist, but they have no chance of having it be a real commercial competitor to Office.
Apache is a similar situation - a whole bunch of people want a stable webserver, but building one from the ground up is expensive and difficult, and selling it afterwards is even harder. So by making something open source you get other people to help you develop it at no cost to you.
To a corporation, it seems like much more of a super-improved version of an in-house solution competing with commercial solutions. The volunteer aspect of open source is amazing, it's great, it's wonderful - but a lot of the big development comes from people being paid to improve part of it because their company thought that improving the common solution would be a lot better than writing their own. Which largely invalidates MS's argument.
If you wanted to get an admin for a "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" machine, sure, that is easy. The PHBs would be fine with that, more than likely. However, if you wanted to tell them "Our Application "$GOOD_JAVA" doesn't have anybody working on it anymore. We found $DEVELOPER to do it for $55/hr in house" they would possibly balk at the fact that a guy could work on maintaining it. It makes no sense, since if they had "$BIG_INTERNAL_APP" and fired the main developer they would replace him with another guy to maintain it with little to no training.
I know one Microsoft employee. He is evil and anti-OSS (well he says he has no problem with OSS projects run by "professionals" (which he seems to define as a person who has previously worked at a high-profile, well-recognized company)). He compared "Joe schmoe" OSS projects as he calls them to cars held together with duct tape. Just this morning he did. I try to have a civilized conversation with him but he can't stop dissing me (particularly my age and relative lack of coding experience) and he immediately goes on the offensive when the conversation turns to anything OSS-related.
You have to put yourself in their shoes though. Imagine you have a high-paying job at a big company working hard to produce quality products (and sometimes failing horribly), and some free apps slapped together by a bunch of young guys who didn't have to claw their way up the corporate ladder are running clean over your work, with code that is sometimes messy, in groups that are sometimes poorly organized. If you were a status-seeking greedhead, that would make your blood boil.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Or open in the sense that they've never released the custom version of Linux they run all of their servers on?
Counterexamples: Doctors without borders (doctors), Pro Bono (lawyers), Jesus (carpenters) [sorry, couldn't resist].
Giving away something for free != holding the gift as valueless. I have rarely seen someone miss a concept as thoroughly as you have.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
I'm my experience, Exchange blows chunks. The most commonly complained about windows software at work.
Google is an avid supporter of open source software and google uses open source software, google motivates development of open source software.
Microsoft is all too aware of this, and the big issue they are facing is a well entrenched google. They can't even afford to break google, because than Microsoft would face a severe penalty (monopoly abuse).
Are you guys in here all blind or something? Just connect the dots and it's all too obvious. There is a corporate war going on, and Microsoft is on the losing side.
The open source community is just a weapon of everyone opposite to the "Microsoft" camp, as is SCO a weapon on the "Microsoft" camp. But who's more on the side where Microsoft is on?
And more importantly; who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys?
No offense but you simply do not understand what OSS is.
OSS isn't Sourceforge, it isn't Linux, nor Firefox, nor Gimp nor any singular piece of software. It isn't documentation or lack of documentation, bugginess or non-bugginess is also not OSS. After all, any attribute you want to assign to OSS projects/software is equally assignable to non-OSS. Windows is easy to use and well documented? My Arse. If that were true why the multi-billion dollar Windows training industry? Why the multibillion dollar book industry? Simple: the claim is bogus. Most software has bugs and almost every piece of software could be better documented. Thus all of your "reasons" about OSS not being a threat are invalid on their face. I've even seen a lot of commercial software not "EXPLAIN WHAT THE PRODUCT IS" on their website. Your vapor anecdotes notwithstanding this is not an aspect of interest either.
The reason OSS is threat to MS is no market share. It is not mindshare. It is a shift in expectations and beliefs.
How many people 5-10 years ago thought the Windows==computer? Compare that to now. That expectation is shifting, and that expectation is a core principle of the MS business model. It is a long-term growth threat in the sense that it takes time to build and when it reaches "the crisis stage" it is too late. Another aspect of the threat of OSS to MS is "freedom". Nor GNU freedom per-se but vendor freedom - choice. With the growth of Linux, came a fertile ground for other alternatives such as OpenOffice.org - and yes I am well aware of it's history. This led to the creation of a pressure valve. As MS predictably increased their punishment on those not paying the proper financial respect, the existence of this pressure valve allowed some to take it. As more did so the movement for "open document" standards grew more intense and larger. This triggered more people to even *think* about alternatives.
It's that thinking about alternatives that is the crucial chink in the MS business model. It is much like Afghanistan was to the USSR. The illusion that you *need* Microsoft has cracked, and chunks are falling off. That is the single largest threat to MS's business model. People will switch to other alternatives - even if they are proprietary ones for someone else.
The second major aspect of the OSS threat to MS (by way of their business model specifically) is what OSS enables. Consider the use of a supercomputer for something like SETI or protein folding. Now consider the use of distributed computing such as SETI At Home of Folding At Home. OSS enables the tapping of far more developers than can be managed by an organization. It also enables companies to rise quickly and establish dominance. One example is Google. Google would not have happened in a world w/o "a Linux". It would have been cost prohibitive. OSS enables that type of company to shoot up in a relatively few short years to absolute domination. It also enables competitors to work together.
This working together allows competitors of all sizes converge on a common underlying platform and provide for each of them to establish their specialties or "particular advantages". They share the otherwise unmanageable mass of talented programmers and supplement it with their own developers. OSS enabled OSX. Look at the significant turnaround in Mac usage with OSX - even before the Intel switch. This accelerates the shattering of the "Windows is the Computer" illusion which MS bases it's model on.
These are (some of) the major aspects of OSS that are the threat to MS. Not the specific products themselves but what affect of these products, their existence, has on the minds of the people using them. It may take a generational changeover but it is inevitable at this point.
Your problem is you are too busy looking at the bugs on the trees to understand you are looking at a rainforest. The "ecology" of the software and computing world is changing. The way we use the electronic world is changing and it is due to OSS, not MS. Facebook, MySpace, F
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.