The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.
Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?
Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a significant amount of money" in the open-source database vendor, EnterpriseDB. As he told me:
This is a great step forward for our company and for Postgres. Red Hat has done heroic work bringing commercial open source to mainstream enterprise adoption. And it's making a difference: arguably billions of dollars of spend in operating system and middleware has gone back to customers. You want to talk about returning control to users? That's the real yardstick. That's real disruption.
For EnterpriseDB to have the trust and support of Red Hat as a partner and investor is a huge help to our company and I think it gives another strong indication to enterprise customers challenging their old spending habits, that there is more they can do.
It's important to note that Red Hat has been distributing Postgres for some time. It's in every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora that Red Hat ships. As such, it's already in the hands of thousands of Red Hat customers and users, and is in heavy demand in some geographies, particularly Latin America. But until now Red Hat has not provided robust support for the database on par with its support for Linux and JBoss.
That's about to change.
The change is good for Red Hat customers, but this isn't the only area in which Red Hat has been seeking to expand its influence. Red Hat has been actively looking for opportunities to invest in a variety of open-source companies, most recently investing in JasperSoft.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, however, nicely marries pragmatism with idealism, as suggested by his comments on EnterpriseDB's subscription model:"EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model. Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial."
He's right, but it's interesting to hear him laud a model (i.e., a subscription to proprietary and open-source software, plus maintenance and support) from which he distanced Red Hat in Red Hat's Q1 earnings call. ("I certainly hope for and we certainly like to work with other open source companies out there. But those are fundamentally different business then what we're doing.")
He's right the second time (in the EnterpriseDB news release). They are not fundamentally different business models. I suspect his comments on the earnings call reflected an attempt to get out of an inaccurate and misleading question from the ever-entertaining Trip Chowdhry.
Regardless, Red Hat's investment in Postgres vendor EnterpriseDB suggests that it, along with IBM and others, is prepared to bolster alternatives to MySQL in its larger quest to provide real competition in the database industry.
To be fair, Red Hat's interest in Postgres and EnterpriseDB precedes the EU's intervention in Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL. The interest is understandable: Postgres is a great choice for a wide variety of database workloads. It's built for transactions and higher-end use cases, like the Oracle and IBM database workloads that it can replace (or augment).
EnterpriseDB plays into Red Hat's overarching strategy of commoditizing key infrastructure, as Whitehurst has noted. Given that the $20 billion database market is concentrated in just three vendors who control 85 percent of the market, databases are ripe for disruption, disruption that Red Hat can feed from a distance.
Red Hat's investment in EnterpriseDB says more about Red Hat's increasing awareness of its larger role in the open-source ecosystem than it does of any competition with MySQL. It's about time.
We have reached a critical inflection point for open source.
With everyone from Qualcomm to UBS to Microsoft embracing open source in one shape or another, the question is no longer "why" to use open source, but rather "how."
Because of this changing mindset around open-source adoption, we no longer need evangelists encouraging open-source adoption. Adoption is a given. It's the default.
No, what we need now are those that can illustrate how to derive the most benefit from the inevitable adoption of open source.
This is perhaps evident in MindTouch's just-released survey of the most influential people in open source today, as voted by over 50 top-level open-source business executives. People like Larry Augustin, Marten Mickos, Dries Buytaert, Mark Radcliffe, and Andrew Aitken make the list. (Note: I am honored to be on the list as well.) They are there not because they're open-source cheerleaders, but because they have helped vendors and customers alike understand how to get the most from open-source investments.
The trend away from evangelism is also apparent in the types of industry events that still draw an audience. The Linux Foundation's inaugural LinuxCon amassed over 700 attendees, in large part because it promised (and delivered) tutorial-like education on how to get the most from Linux deployments.
In a similar manner, O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Open Source Business Conference (Disclosure: I'm program chair for OSBC), ApacheCon, EclipseCon, Red Hat Summit, and other such events remain popular because they give attendees real-world insight into how to get the most from open source.
The message used to be, "Open source is powerful! You should try it." The market got the message, to the point that open source is a de facto component of virtually every technology vendor's strategy and is reaching ubiquity in enterprise deployments, too.
It's time for the next phase of open source, the practical phase where we focus on how to deploy open source, not why.
This is what I (unsuccessfully) tried to say in my "Free Software Is Dead. Long Live Open Source!" post. I certainly wasn't saying that GPL-licensed free software is dead, or should die. Rather, I was (and am) arguing that pragmatism is the new order of the day: how real companies and developers derive real benefits from real software.
No ideology. Just adoption.
That's the message that resonates today and, frankly, always has been the right message for open source. It's what is driving widespread open-source adoption and will continue to do so, provided we can effectively help would-be adopters understand "how" now that they've bought into "why."
Apparently, Qualcomm didn't get the memo. Open-source developers as a group tend to be hostile to patents, believing that they're detrimental to technology innovation.
But Qualcomm, a company devoted more than most to acquiring and prosecuting patents, announced Monday the launch of a wholly owned subsidiary called the Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) to focus on open-source development for mobile.
The patent king seeks to become the open-source king?
Maybe. Maybe not. The mission of QuIC signals an intent to blend the best of mobile open source with the best of Qualcomm's proprietary technology:
Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry....Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm that brings together a dedicated group of engineers focused on this area of growing innovation. With the goal of investing greater resources into enabling and optimizing open source software with Qualcomm technology, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. works closely with the open source community to enable the faster advancement of the wireless industry as a whole.
It's a welcome sign, but as yet Qualcomm has demonstrated negligible involvement with any open-source community One of the cardinal rules for engaging with open-source development communities is to, well, engage with them.
Typically, this means writing and contributing code. Code is the coin of the open-source realm, and I'm unaware of much involvement from Qualcomm in this area.
So let me offer a suggested shortcut for Qualcomm: hire someone to educate you. Danese Cooper, formerly of Intel and Sun Microsystems and recently departed from Revolution Computing, could help to shake things up on Qualcomm's San Diego campus. And there are others.
In whichever way Qualcomm opts to do it, the company must engage with open-source communities through free code transfer in order to be taken seriously and to have a chance of influencing such communities.
For example, as noted in GigaOM, Qualcomm intends for QuIC to help it optimize its technology for Android, Chrome, Moblin, and other mobile open-source projects. Yet given that the company doesn't even show up in the list of top Linux contributors, how can we expect to see Qualcomm play a meaningful role in distributions like Android?
No one is going to give Qualcomm bonus points for creating a subsidiary to focus on open-source development, if little open-source code is actually contributed.
In this Qualcomm could learn a lesson from Adobe Systems, which despite maintaining a healthy business in proprietary software, is learning to engage productively with open-source communities, as highlighted in The H Online.
In sum, it is welcome that Qualcomm finally sees enlightened self-interest in leveraging open-source software for the good of its business. Now it just needs to learn to accelerate such benefits through real code contributions--and not simply nice-sounding business units.
There's a lot of buzz today on the Obama Administration's decision to run WhiteHouse.gov on Drupal, the popular open-source Web publishing system. Given the U.S. federal government's widespread adoption of open source, however, the amazing thing is that it took so long.
It is now, anyway. This is a big shift in the federal attitude toward open source.
Back in 2004, I worked in the Linux Business Office at Novell and met with the CIO for the U.S. Senate. He knew about open source and admitted that other departments were dipping their toes in it, but the Senate was a decidedly Microsoft shop and had no plans to change.
While I don't have an update on the U.S. Senate's adoption of open source, the rest of the government seems to have gone far beyond "toe dipping." Open-source adoption throughout the U.S. federal government is rampant, and started long before President Obama took office.
NASA's Nebula platform is just one example of how the government is actively using open-source technologies (like Apache SOLR, RabbitMQ, MySQL, and Eucalyptus), but also contributing back.
Unlike other geographies, which have relied on government mandates and preferences to accelerate open-source uptake, the U.S. government hasn't been the driving force in open-source adoption, or even the primary force. U.S. public and private sectors have been equally enthusiastic about open source.
For example, it's nice that WhiteHouse.gov runs Drupal, but adoption in the private sector by FedEx, Sony Music, and many others precedes President Obama's choice of Drupal.
The open-source train has left the building. Even companies like Qualcomm, the patent powerhouse that has traditionally disdained open source, are making open source a core business strategy. Qualcomm is setting up a subsidiary to focus on mobile open-source platforms.
Yes, pigs can fly.
What's driving this adoption? It's not necessarily open source's price tag. After all, in the short term, open source isn't necessarily less expensive, once you factor in migration costs, retraining, etc. (Note: you'd hit these same costs even if you moved to a different proprietary system.)
Of course, proprietary software is no bargain-basement cost saver, either. Even Windows 7, that no-brainer IT decision in the wake of Vista's pain, could cost enterprises as much as $1,930 per instance, according to Gartner.
No, in my experience, open source is winning converts because it gives CIOs more control of their destiny.
In part such control stems from the nature of competition itself. As open source proves itself a viable contender for CIO dollars and thereby spark price competition, CIOs save, as Novell CMO John Dragoon notes.
But open source's superior value proposition goes deeper. Open source calls into question the highly profitable maintenance fees that Oracle, SAP, and traditional software vendors use to juice their earnings, but which do little to help customers.
In fact, the traditional software economy can be downright hostile to buyers, as Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt opines.
Open source is different. Because the code is open, open-source vendors are forced to deliver a constant stream of value to justify subscription renewals. ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn captures this well:
When you can see the code you have a different relationship with it. You're no longer asking what it can do. You're asking how you can adapt it to your needs.
With code visibility, you and your vendors become partners in trying to make something work. The vendor can't over-promise, but you can't over-assume either. This may be one of main hidden reasons for IT failure, the two sides of the transaction not being on the same page.
It's not surprising, therefore, that Red Hat continues to be the CIO's darling for lowering costs and delivering value. It's also not surprising that the Obama Administration adopted Drupal for WhiteHouse.gov.
No, what is surprising is that it took so long.
Google was born on the Web and is increasingly giving Microsoft fits by forcing the decades-old software giant to compete on Google's terms. Like open source. Like cloud computing.
Microsoft may shore up its fortunes in the short term with a successful Windows 7 launch. But in the long term, its very success with outdated "desktop" products threaten to cede the market to Google.
We'll have all of it, please
It's not really fair to Microsoft. Microsoft is a victim of its own success, needing to cater to its existing clientele with each new release, in true "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion. Hence, Microsoft continues to make a lot of money, but its last two quarters have seen traditional strengths like Windows become a drag on earnings as enterprises spend more money with Google, Red Hat, and others.
Google's lack of legacy frees it to innovate rapidly and broadly, as Genentench CIO Todd Pierce, a Google Apps customer, suggests:
The rate of innovation at Google is - well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google's product cycle is five days. It's incremental. In five days you're not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won't have Microsoft Office.
Microsoft, for its part, is so concerned with "backward compatibility"--"Is this product/feature compatible with our ability to continue to monetize our 1980s-style desktop monopoly?"--that it continues to struggle to embrace the Web. CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg points out that Windows 7 should have been Microsoft's launchpad to cloud computing, but isn't.
There are a lot of "should have beens" for Microsoft when it comes to the Web.
Meanwhile, no one is slowing down for Microsoft. Let's stick with cloud computing for a minute. VMware dominates virtualization and has a strong claim on cloud computing, though open-source rivalry from Eucalyptus and VMops threatens to challenge both VMware and Microsoft as they seek to dominate cloud computing.
And then there's Google, which provides an increasingly wide array of cloud-based services to enterprises looking to untether themselves from the desktop. In an interview with CNET News, Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that "The browser can be both enterprise- and consumer-capable. The architecture is driven from the browser. That is the story of enterprise IT today."
In other words, the desktop is simply the means by which a user loads a browser. It's a gateway. The value is not in the desktop anymore. It's in the browser, which is the new desktop, in terms of real functionality delivered.
Microsoft's big opportunity to stymie the threat from Google and others is SharePoint. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has described it as Microsoft's new operating system, but it's in a recent interview with Forrester that he makes this meaningful:
In my own mind I compare (SharePoint) to the PC, the PC started off life as a spreadsheet machine, then became a programming machine, a word processing machine, (SharePoint is) a general purpose infrastructure that connects people to people and people to information....
I think SharePoint is considered a very serious development platform for rapid application development (by IT architects and developers).
SharePoint is Microsoft's best attempt to connect desktop applications like Office with centralized, cloud/cloud-like collaboration and storage. Yes, Microsoft has other initiatives like online Office, but none marries so well its legacy profit centers with future innovation. And, given that SharePoint is already a $1 billion and frenetically growing business, it has momentum that other initiatives don't.
SharePoint, then, may be Microsoft's best hope for marrying its legacy to the future of Web-based computing.
Microsoft needs something like this. It is losing in mobile, and not simply to Apple. Google's Android momentum is almost astounding, with AdMob data pegging Android smartphone penetration in the U.K. at 10 percent, as but one example.
If we assume that mobile will increasingly be the client platform of choice, then we see Google squeezing Microsoft from the top (cloud) and the bottom (client).
In both areas, open source is Google's weapon of choice, and it's one that Microsoft is going to have to figure out quickly if it wants to be a player on the Web. The Web is too big for Microsoft to control it, and the Web is overwhelmingly open source, as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor states:
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the Web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
All of the servers, pretty much, they run Linux as the operating system; they run Apache as the basic Web server on top of which everything else is built. The main languages out of which Web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the Web is open source ... the Web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
Kapor further suggests that Microsoft's war with open source is over, or should be over: open source has won. It's essential infrastructure now, and hence something that Microsoft needs to embrace, not fight. This isn't about open-source religion. It's about pragmatism. Pragmatism that Microsoft, like anyone else, can embrace.
Google is using the future (open source, cloud) to compete for the future, and its tactics threaten to hit Microsoft in its profit centers like Windows.
Microsoft, however, appears to be mired in its past. Windows 7 looks to be a serious upgrade over its Vista predecessor, but in 10 years time, will we care? Or will we have moved on, forgetting about those quaint days when we used to care about the operating system and applications like Office?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Had Vizzini of "The Princess Bride" lived to relate a third "classic blunder" beyond land wars in Asia and competing with Sicilians, he might have urged start-ups to avoid hardware-dependent strategies. Hardware, after all, can be expensive to build and can't match software for ease (and cost) of distribution.
So, is hardware a bad idea for start-ups? Or are we just thinking about hardware in the wrong way?
Open me up, find software/services inside.
Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign suggests that the hardware business, long shunned by Silicon Valley VCs for its costs and complexities, may be getting easier due to ready-made manufacturing capacity in China, which is driving down the cost of building hardware.
Open-source hardware could drop the price of development even further, as Om Malik recently wrote. Give away the designs for your hardware and let would-be customers build it themselves.
This is a particularly appealing strategy for companies that depend upon hardware to drive what are essentially software businesses. Apple builds its own hardware because it wants to control the complete consumer experience, but it could also enable third parties to build hardware that is optimized to run iTunes, OS X, and other Apple software.
Yet hardware could prove the undoing of Apple in smartphones, just as it did in the personal computer industry, when the pioneer Mac gave way to the relentless, ubiquitous Windows.
Sure, Apple's iPhone is currently blowing the competition out of the water. Google Android, however, poses a serious threat, given its ability to embrace multiple hardware vendors with a common platform. Were Google to extend this strategy with open-source hardware, too, the strategy could prove even more disruptive to Apple's current dominance.
Android's momentum is a sobering reminder to Apple that community can trump control.
This same strategy applies to others, too. What about TiVo? Or Sling Media? These are all companies that have built and distribute their own hardware, but really what they're providing is software or services. The hardware is simply there to enable consumer access to software-driven data or entertainment businesses.
So why not open source the hardware and, hopefully, accelerate adoption by lowering the cost of manufacture and distribution?
This is exactly what we're seeing happen in software, as companies race to open source complements to their core businesses. Intel with Linux, Google with Android, IBM with Linux/Apache/more, etc.
Can it work for hardware, too? I think so. But we're still waiting on someone to prove it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
It boggles the mind, but it's apparently true: nearly half of enterprises think a software purchase is successful if the software is installed/deployed, according to a new study. If ever there was reason to believe there's room for improvement in enterprise IT, and billions of dollars to go with it, this is it.
Working software should be the starting point, not an end point.
According to a study recently released by Neochange, Sandhill Group, and the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), 45.3 percent of the 353 IT professionals surveyed call a software purchase successful if "the software is deployed/installed."
No, this isn't enterprise IT's only criterion for software success. After all, 75.4 percent pegged their aspirations a bit higher: "Business benefits realization (cost reduction, revenue generation, etc.)." (Note: respondents could choose more than one answer; hence, the results don't add up to 100 percent.)
But it's scary that the software industry has conditioned IT buyers to expect so little. No one should claim victory on the basis of getting software installed, and we should be hitting close to 100 percent actually getting tangible business value for their software investments.
But then, more than half the survey's respondents admitted to not even measuring success criteria. Could this be a sign that IT executives, like the sign greeting Dante on his descent into Hell, have abandoned all hope of getting real value for their software spend?
Things may be getting better. As reported on Tuesday, Google and Red Hat topped CIO Insight's Vendor Value survey. Times are tight, and enterprises apparently can't afford to call software purchases successful just for running as they should.
Red Hat's chief of European operations, Werner Knoblich, says as much in an interview with The Register:
Microsoft was untouchable until recently, but now everything gets considered, which is one of the reasons [Red Hat's] results have been pretty strong. Clearly a downturn is never good generically, it's a bad thing. But our value proposition resonates pretty well all the same.
In the case of both open source and SaaS, enterprises don't pay a dime until they actually see the software working. Working software is the default. It's not cause for special celebration.
The Neochange, et al, survey also asks, "What is the most important factor for realizing value from enterprise software?" The answer "Gaining user buy-in and ensuring effective usage to deliver business impact" garnered a 71.7 percent vote. That's more easily achieved with open-source software, in particular, which allows enterprises to evaluate and use software long before they opt to purchase support or add-on services/software (if, indeed, they ever elect to do so).
In this way, open source improves upon typical IT success. With more than half of those surveyed reporting "less than 49 percent effective software usage," there's clearly room for a better model to optimize software utilization.
We can do better. We must. About 30 percent of those surveyed look to software to enable "business innovation, revenue generation, and market competitiveness."
Such enterprises are increasingly looking to open source to serve as the foundation for innovation. This probably wasn't the "fundamental economic reset" Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had in mind, but it will do. And it's about time.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
The freedom to fork is the essential right of open-source software. Until Oracle's attempted acquisition of Sun/MySQL, however, few realized just how important it would be to retain the right to fork one's own code.
After all, just because you have the letter-of-the-law right to fork doesn't mean you have a meaningful ability to do so. So long as you're not the primary copyright holder, you're always going to be second place, with second-place commercial opportunities in the software.
MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius hints at this in his letter to the European Commission, citing conflicts of interest between Oracle and MySQL development interests. Such conflicts wouldn't be of such importance were it not for the lack of external commercial appeal that stems from MySQL's use of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Even Richard Stallman, co-author of the GPL and founder of the free-software movement, and not someone that spends much time worrying about monetization of open-source software, gets this.
As noted in a letter co-drafted with Open Rights Group and Knowledge Ecology International, Stallman notes that Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL could hurt its development because the GPL reduces incentives to commercialize the code:
The acquisition of MySQL by Oracle will be a major setback to the development of a FLOSS database platform, potentially alienating and dispersing MySQL's core community of developers. It could take several years before another database platform could rival the progress and opportunities now available to MySQL, because it will take time before any of them attract and cultivate a large enough team of developers and achieve a similar customer base.
Given that forking of the MySQL code base will be particularly dependent on FLOSS community contributions - more so than on in-company development - the lack of a more flexible license for MySQL will present considerable barriers to a new forked development path for MySQL. [Emphasis added.]
For those who have been reading/hearing Stallman for the past 10-plus years as I have, this admission is shocking in the extreme. The GPL, which is supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of software freedom, may deliver the opposite. Because of its control-freak urges, it can stymie competition, which is presumably why Stallman is now calling on the European Commission to grant what his license couldn't: freedom.
Now consider if MySQL were licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. MySQL 2 could arise, take the code, hire all of the developers, and development of the open-source database would not miss a beat.
Could MySQL 2 achieve the same with the GPL? No, it could not, because the copyright holder, Oracle, would always have a superior commercial opportunity, because it has more rights than downstream users, as the GPL leaves the copyright holder with a greater range of business model options, and not simply support/services.
Apache leaves everyone--developers, users, vendors, etc.--on equal footing. The GPL does not. With the GPL, the copyright holder retains effective control.
That's one reason it has been so popular with commercial open-source companies, but the Oracle/MySQL situation may prompt more companies to consider using an Apache license so as to preserve maximum freedom in case of takeover, hostile or otherwise.
Disclosure: My company uses the GPL but has been actively considering areas to use Apache licensing.
For years, Red Hat sat unopposed at the top of the CIO Insight Vendor Value study. In 2008, however, Google pushed Red Hat aside with its low-cost, easy-to-use enterprise applications. This year, Red Hat has come roaring back to share the top ranking with Google.
Could this be a sign of CIOs' restive relationships with traditional vendors and an increasingly insatiable appetite for the cost and ease-of-use advantages of open source and software as a service/cloud computing?
The answer is almost certainly "Yes." It is telling that old-school vendors like IBM (ranked 20th overall), Microsoft (25th), Novell (29th), and Oracle (35th) are so far down the CIOs' list.
It is equally telling, however, that it is with these apparently less-preferred vendors that CIOs spend the vast majority of their IT budgets. Or perhaps that's the point? In other words, CIOs spend with such vendors today because they have to, but given their druthers, they're going to invest more money in Red Hat and Google going forward.
Red Hat and Google are still rounding errors in the overall IT spending picture, but CIOs seem to be signaling an appetite for more. It's not about reducing lock-in and other colorful marketing phrases, either: it's about great, easy-to-use software at a compelling price.
You know, the very thing that Microsoft used to win CIO plaudits for delivering.
From the report:
CIOs are more likely to try software as a service (than traditional, packaged software), which is better understood and simpler to use and requires no upfront investment in hardware or software.
This is the heart of the CIO uprising. And it's why low-cost, high-value companies like Intel (ranked first overall), Cisco/WebEx (ranked sixth and 11th, respectively), and Sun (sixth) are climbing the charts.
For now, however, Google and Red Hat rule the roost in the Software category of CIO Insight's annual study:
Both Red Hat and Google essentially offer the same thing: great software on a subscription basis. While this model often offers lower prices than competitors, it's important to note that "free" is not the value proposition here. (If it were, for example, Red Hat customers would be leaving in droves for Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, CentOS. They aren't.)
No, the value proposition is customer control via the subscription model that enables less costly ways to buy into the software, and to turn off maintenance costs, if desired.
It's a winning formula, one that more vendors should consider adopting. Today IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle command the majority of IT dollars, but this survey suggests a rebellion is underway. Inertia can only support the traditional vendors for so long.
For years, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM have used Linux to lower the cost of their hardware and software-based solutions, while keeping profit margins fat and healthy. Google, ever the quick learner, is now doing the same with Android.
The mobile market will never be the same.
Take a peek inside the Android.
(Credit: Google)Just as Google and others are using open-source software to lower barriers to adoption of their proprietary cloud offerings, so, too, is Google using open source to reduce the cost of mobile computing in order to drive uptake of its proprietary search-related advertising business in mobile.
Google CFO Patrick Pichette said as much in Google's most recent earnings call:
If we move forward the adoption of these smartphones by having a lower cost infrastructure because it's open source...all the (mobile) searches...will happen so much faster.
Open source: it's all about peace, love...and capitalism.
However, Android is more than just a way to shave a few dollars off a phone's purchase price. Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's executive director, declared recently that Linux offers "greater flexibility, freedom from lock-in, and lack of licensing costs."
He's right, but I'd argue that the "lock-in" argument is a bit of a throwaway line and the cost advantages are of secondary importance. The real value for would-be Android developers is its flexibility, which in turn helps to corral a community of interested participants.
Google Android's open-source license also encourages broad experimentation with the platform by a range of device manufacturers. Some handsets will be flops, but others, like Verizon's forthcoming Motorola-developed Droid, look likely to succeed.
Google can play the odds because, unlike Apple, it hasn't tied its fate to any one device. Instead, it has intentionally spread Android's risk--and chances of success--through its open-source license.
It's genius. Sheer genius.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems determined to revive Microsoft's stale desktop monopoly, as reported by The New York Times and, in mobile, is focused on toppling Apple's iPhone "momentum." But he probably should be more worried about Android as a long-term community play.
Mobile is the future, and that future is going to be heavily influenced by open source.
Linux has succeeded in servers precisely because a wide array of Microsoft competitors have converged on it as a way to club Microsoft. The same is happening in development tools (Eclipse), browsers (Firefox), Web servers (Apache), and more.
In Android, then, Microsoft isn't simply competing with Google. It's competing with the entire industry--or will be, soon enough.
Google, for its part, should continue to spearhead Android development, but must find ways to open Android further to outside involvement. Otherwise, it stands to lose out to open-source alternatives like Symbian if they do a better job at encouraging community uptake. Google really doesn't need to control the platform to succeed.
In fact, given that its revenue derives from proprietary services delivered on top of the Android platform, its best chance for success is to do whatever is necessary to further proliferate Android.
Android is powerful with Google behind it, but it would be much more so with Nokia, Palm, and others. As in the server war, such vendors may find it advantageous to abandon their "Unix" variants to combine behind Android.
That is the power of open source, and it's how Google has made such intelligent use of Android. It's not about freedom from lock-in; it's about freedom to demolish competitors and serve customers by shifting the rules of the game.
