The Open Road

The mobile-computing world is increasingly a two-horse race between Google and Apple, with Apple clearly in the lead but Google Android making up ground quickly. Microsoft and Symbian are also still in the game, but the ultimate winner will be the one that best appeals to consumers or developers.

Or both.

Sexy? Yes. But what about the developers?

This struck home while reading Mark Sigal's analysis of the "inevitability" of Google Android. On his way to dismantling the idea that Google's victory is assured, Sigal stumbles into apparently divergent interest groups:

[U]nlike the PC, where "good enough" was the bar required to seize the market,...for most consumers, their mobile device of choice is a lifestyle decision, a personal, ever-present extension of themselves that is resident in a way that never existed before with the PC--a value proposition that Apple has completely run with on iPhone (and iPod before that).

Fundamentally, though, mobile is a platform play, a game that is largely won by securing the hearts and minds of developers, and for them, the expectation bar is now set pretty high, owing to the success of iPhone across so many domains....

If you're Google (or Microsoft or Symbian), then, who do you target? Developers or consumers?

It's a real question, as while both parties' interests ultimately converge (consumers want developers to make great applications so that those same consumers can pay the developers lots of money), the short-term interests of consumers (sexy product) and developers (ease and richness of development platform) don't necessarily go together.

Motorola RAZR? Sexy product, lame development platform. Windows Mobile? Arguably a solid development platform...with almost zero sex appeal for consumers.

This is why John Carroll is probably right to argue that Microsoft should reinvigorate its mobile strategy with an emphasis on .Net as a powerful way for developers to write powerful mobile applications, it's not going to be enough. Microsoft can port all the business applications it wants for Windows Mobile. It won't matter.

Consumers don't buy business applications. Not until after they've chosen a phone that meets their personal needs, first.

Yes, enterprises do try to dictate corporate standards with Blackberrys and dull Dell PCs heading the list. But in the fast-changing mobile market, you can't hope that consumers will be forced to use your software. You want them to want to do so.

This is why I believe Google has a good chance of taking a serious bite out of Apple, and Symbian and Microsoft do not. Symbian is too difficult an application development platform, as Gartner notes, and Microsoft...is boring.

Not that it needs to be. XBox certainly isn't, and actually helped Microsoft surpass Apple in a recent consumer survey focused on product innovation.

But not in mobile, or even in computers. Apple understands how to create wicked cool products that consumers want, which is why its Mac sales are projected to grow by 26 percent in 2010, right through the recession, and why its iPhone continues to thrive.

But Apple's Achilles heel could well be developers, which are reportedly tiring of Apple's apparently arbitrary application approval and updating process. If Google can continue to help handset manufacturers to achieve the "Wow factor," while simultaneously creating a more open, robust development platform, it just might be able to beat Apple at the game it started.

In other words, the winning mobile vendor will be the one that marries sex appeal for consumers with platform appeal for developers. Google is on course to deliver, but it probably needs to win big with consumers before it makes waves with developers.

Is Apple an enterprise software or hardware company? That's the question Gartner's Nick Jones asks, ultimately answering with "you have to have a pretty relaxed definition [of enterprise] before Apple fits it."

"Enterprise" is defined by the company you keep.

With this definition in mind, Apple clearly fits the "enterprise" moniker, whether Apple wants it or not. As BusinessWeek reported back in 2008, the Mac is finding its way into enterprise computing, with or without the IT department's blessing. Ditto the iPhone.

Is it somehow less enterprise because the CIO didn't issue a policy giving permission?

Maybe "enterprise" means something more than "gets used a lot within the enterprise." In fact, Jones points out a few reasons he, personally, doesn't feel Apple is an enterprise vendor:

Apple does the bare minimum for enterprises, they aren't deeply committed to security, management, road maps, low TCO and so on. And they don't open up the architecture of iPhone enough for third parties to fill the holes.

But, again, is this really how we should define "enterprise?"

It reminds me of the criticisms leveled at open-source software early in its adoption. Originally Linux, for example, wasn't considered "enterprise grade" or "enterprise ready," presumably because it didn't meet Jones' hurdles above.

Now, however, Linux is considered an essential enterprise technology. What changed? Nothing...except adoption.

Here's a test for Jones: while Gartner pooh-poohs Apple's iPhone as an enterprise mobile device, perhaps for a variety of good definitional reasons, will it hold to such a rationale once the iPhone's market share within the enterprise dwarfs that of Windows Mobile, which has lost a third of its market share since 2008?

Seriously, at some point it won't be enough to listen to Microsoft's Ray Ozzie deprecate the iPhone's enterprise credentials because its 100,000-plus applications are "not very deep" and lack the "thousands of man years" that have gone into the applications that run on Windows. It won't make sense. Why? Because no matter how "enterprise grade" those Windows Mobile applications are, few within the enterprise are using them.

Enterprise is as enterprise does. Would you rather work for the company that builds software for the enterprise, or would you prefer to work for the company whose software gets used by the enterprise?

If you can have both, great. But it's silly to say Apple isn't an enterprise company simply because it sells to the enterprise without even trying.

It's a convenient fiction that Microsoft is the source of all evil in the technology world, particularly for a vocal minority within the open-source community.

For such people, Microsoft hate is an excuse for a distinct lack of introspection, and credits Microsoft with far better execution and strategy than it actually possesses.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a goofy laugh. I'm not sure it's an evil one.

I mention Microsoft because some within the open-source community quickly pounced on the company's inadvertent violation of the GPL in its Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. Microsoft's Peter Galli was quick to acknowledge it:

[The license violation] was not intentional on our part. While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process.

As conspiracies against open source go, it sounds pretty harmless--because it probably is. Open-source licensing is complex enough and the process for acquiring open-source software is loose enough, that there is room for all sorts of error, both nefarious and benign.

Guess what? People--and corporations filled with people--make mistakes. Even Microsoft. If it was as evil as some suspect, the devil himself would be out of a job.

As open-source adoption dramatically increases, we should expect to see errors of this kind increase, and not out of any sinister plan to pilfer open-source code. Errors are natural and are evidence that adoption is spreading beyond the inner sanctum of open sourcerors.

We shouldn't expect open-source adoption to be flawless or painless.

Consider Symbian. The foundation decided to aggressively embrace open source as a way to guide it to an optimistic future, but the process of open-sourcing its code is taking time. A lot of time. As Rich Sands suggests, Symbian may actually be taking too much time, frustrating its community and allowing Google Android to assume the leadership position in open-source mobile platforms.

Who knew that giving away things for free could be so hard?

It's tempting to think that open source should be an automatic reflex for companies and individuals alike. It's not. It takes time to learn how to do it properly, and even then mistakes are possible. Perhaps likely.

In the case of its Windows 7 tool, Microsoft screwed up. It's not the first time, and it's not the last.

But error is not evil.

One App Store to rule them all?

(Credit: Apple)

Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.

We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.

I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.

They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?

More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?

After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?

Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").

This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.

At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.

Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."

Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.

As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.

Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?

It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.

How about you?

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.

Symbian has the market share; Apple's iPhone has the mind share. The future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open-source developers. Microsoft, with its long-standing interest in developers, also needs to reach out to open-source developers, if it wants to succeed.

Part of this reason is cost. As IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests, Research In Motion could reduce its cost and improve the reach of its platform through open source:

RIM should be utilizing R&D investments more effectively by leveraging existing open-source projects. RIM could have built (its software development kit) for a lower investment by starting with PhoneGap or an equivalent open-source framework...This was absolutely a missed opportunity for RIM to compete versus Apple, Palm, and others using open source.

No, I'm not going to suggest that RIM open-source the BlackBerry Enterprise Server; that would be silly. Rather, I believe RIM could have saved R&D costs, increased the value of its BlackBerry platform, and influenced developers building for the iPhone, if RIM had built the Widget SDK on top of (an) open-source project like PhoneGap.

Symbian is taking this road, as Michael Mace points out, putting developers, and not itself, at the center of attention. The more money third-party developers can make with Symbian, the better off Symbian will be.

Palm, too, is trying to appeal to open-source developers by making it cheap and lucrative to develop for Palm devices.

Apple's world, by contrast, comes with a hugely sexy device, optimized distribution...and low return on investment for its developers, according to Newsweek. In Apple's world, developers add value to Apple, but not necessarily to themselves.

Microsoft is different. Although the company has not committed its mobile strategy to open source, it is a company that has a serious romance with developers. With 97 percent of its sales coming through its channel, Microsoft depends upon third-party development and distribution partners.

Windows Mobile 6.5

(Credit: Microsoft)

Now Microsoft is launching Windows Mobile 6.5, a light upgrade to previous versions that has failed to catch the media's attention. Today, the company has few--246, to be exact--applications available for version 6.5 in its Windows Marketplace for Mobile, but it has more than 20,000 designed for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1.

The question, however, is whether it can attract new developers to the seemingly moribund Windows Mobile, which declined in market share to just 9 percent of handsets shipped in the second quarter of 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. An open-source complement strategy, similar to what it's using for SharePoint and its CRM product, could help.

It must, as Google is calling.

Microsoft has no choice but at least dabble in open source, regardless of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's publicly sanguine stance on Google. Open-source Google Android is starting to make waves, even if its momentum can be overhyped. Verizon has jumped on the Android bandwagon, citing the "unmatched openness and flexibility of the Android platform."

Open source isn't an afterthought for Google. It's a core business strategy. And it's winning converts.

Ballmer pooh-poohs Android and further discards "free as a business model," but he acknowledges that Android represents open source, with significant financial resources behind it.

There's more to it than this. Free is a great business model, one that Microsoft has used to tremendous effect, as Internet Explorer, SharePoint, Bing, and other Microsoft successes demonstrate and as Techdirt highlights.

Microsoft needs to integrate open source into its mobile strategy. It needs developer attention. As CNET's Ina Fried reports, a recent Windows Mobile 6.5 session at Code Camp attracted just six developers. You don't win with numbers like that, and you don't get developers without open source, anymore.

Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple. Microsoft rightly recognized early on that building products soup-to-nuts, as Apple does, was not the best model to achieve ubiquity (even if some suggest that this model has broken the PC industry). That model works great, early in the formation of a market, as Clayton Christensen theorizes, but it loses its efficacy in mature markets.

Mobile doesn't yet count as "mature," but it's getting there fast.

An enabling strategy similar to what Microsoft did on the "desktop" would succeed in mobile, too, but it's going to require a Googlesque open-source approach for Microsoft--not the Apple approach.

This isn't to suggest that Microsoft should open-source everything. As I learned from my own open-source mobile days at Lineo, to build a successful business in mobile (or elsewhere), you've got to own something.

Google is interested in owning the advertising that results from greater mobile Web browsing and other mobile services. For Microsoft, it could match this, and extend it with ties to its server and personal computer businesses, like SharePoint. It probably can't afford, however, to try to build a big per-unit licensing business--not with Google undermining that model with its free Android.

Microsoft simply needs to find the right "format" in which to deliver its open-source mobile strategy. The software giant has 90,000-plus employees. Surely, one of them can figure this out.

Given the beating Microsoft has taken lately, it's impressive that Microsoft still ranks third in Interbrand's "Best Global Brands 2009" report. Given Microsoft's still-robust brand, what should the company be doing to rejuvenate key areas of its business?

Only IBM (2nd) and Coca-Cola rank higher than Microsoft, and Google (7th) and Intel (9th) trail by a considerable margin. Apple, for all its sex appeal, barely scrapes into the top 20. Such resilience is all the more striking, given Microsoft's less-than-stellar year, as the report suggests:

2009 marks the first year-on-year decline in Microsoft's public history, despite a game console division that continues to be profitable. As the market matures, the giant faces stiff competition from faster, quicker rivals.

In terms of browsing, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has dropped 10 percentage points in market share every two years, while Mozilla Firefox gains 10 percentage points in the same time period. Additionally, a $300 million ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates could have fared better with audiences.

However, Microsoft's Bing, a new search engine that launched in June to great reviews, is poised to give Google a real run for its money.

(Credit: Interbrand)

The technology elite may have given up on Microsoft, but the general consumer public apparently has not. What can Microsoft do to further burnish its brand and improve its financial results?

1. Throw bling at Bing. Google dominates search to a degree reminiscent of Microsoft's dominance in software for personal computers. Bing, however, has rejuvenated Microsoft's search market share by taking a different, innovative slant on search. Microsoft failed at its me-too Live search competition with Google. It needs to continue to differentiate and innovate.
2. Ratchet up its investment in the Xbox. The Xbox makes Microsoft look cool to a class of consumer that is either too young or too cool to buy Microsoft's "desktop" software. The Xbox positions Microsoft as a leader in an industry that doesn't do much to strengthen its personal-computer or server businesses but does wonders for its cachet.
3. Accelerate its interaction with open-source companies and developers, and in more positive ways. Years ago, Microsoft made a show of working with SugarCRM and a few other open-source companies. Since that time, the only real "partnership" announcements out of Redmond relate to patent-licensing agreements. This is the wrong message to be sending, as it positions Microsoft as a predator, not as a partner.
   
   Open source need not be a threat to Microsoft, even if individual projects like Linux are. The company's blunt message needs more nuance, and whispering "peace" while yelling "war" (or even the inverse) is not adequate. Microsoft needs open-source communities working with it, not against it.

These are just a few ideas. I'd love to hear yours, particularly with regard to open source.

The reality is that Microsoft struggles to see beyond Linux, when it discusses open source, and this is a mistake, on its part. I have no problem with Microsoft's sanctification of intellectual property, but this insistence on intellectual property leads the company to throw out all sorts of benefits it could be deriving from open source.

Those benefits could include low-cost distribution, an expanded partner ecosystem, external developer review and contributions to its products, Microsoft technology as the center of the world's fastest-growing developer communities, and more.

Microsoft seems to have its game together on Bing and the Xbox, and it increasingly does better in open source. But it has a long way to go, and it needs to realize that the open-source question isn't about peace and love. It's about capitalism.

Open source can drive greater revenue for the company by making Windows much more appealing. There's no reason that Windows, rather than Linux, shouldn't be the default platform for open source--that is, no reason other than Microsoft itself.

Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, made a startling comment at LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday: "Linux is bloated." While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux "huge and scary now," according to Torvalds.

Is "Tux" getting pudgy?

No. Of course not. It has simply grown as its adoption has expanded. This is the problem with success: you get pulled into an ever-widening array of tasks.

So, while Torvalds declared "We are definitely not the streamlined, hyper-efficient kernel I envisioned when I started writing Linux," Linux is also not the limited-purpose/function kernel he initially envisioned. It's powering everything from corporate data centers to over half of all new smartphones shipped, as the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin noted in his opening keynote.

Even so, it begs a question: will Linux become more like Windows as it becomes even more successful?

I suspect that successful open-source projects, generally, will increasingly look more like Microsoft as they grow. Simultaneously, Microsoft is slowly learning from open source, and I think it will capitulate, too.

Will we meet in the middle? Probably. For now, Linux may be getting a bit chubby, but that's likely cause for celebration, not hand-wringing.

Update @ 6:43 A.M. on Tuesday, September 22, 2009:
One thing that I forgot to mention, but which is critical to the success of Linux, is that there really is no such thing as monolithic "Linux." Linux is highly modular and can be trimmed down/beefed up to fit a wide variety of applications...on the developers' terms, not Red Hat's, Novell's, Canonical's, etc.

So, unlike Windows, which can only be what Microsoft dictates, Linux can truly be all things to all people, as "fat" or as "skinny" as the developer wants it to be. Ubuntu is obese compared to sub-100 KB uClinux distributions, for example. Both serve different, and useful, purposes.

Virtualization may offer a significant advantage to Linux in the decade-old debate over Linux vs. Windows total cost of ownership (TCO). A new Gabriel Consulting Group survey (PDF) of mostly mixed-environment (that is, Windows and Linux) enterprises reveals significantly higher adoption of virtualization technology, with all the cost savings that go with it: less money spent on hardware and licensing fees.

It's an interesting conclusion, but leads to an even more interesting question: why don't Windows administrators take advantage of virtualization to the same extent as Linux administrators? The answer--licensing cost and complexity--is something that Microsoft has the ability, but not the interest, to change.

According to the survey, enterprises that predominantly use Linux virtualize roughly 30 percent more than those that prefer Windows, and heavier virtualization users do so much more aggressively on Linux systems than on Windows:

Linux vs. Windows: Virtualization Trends

(Credit: Gabriel Consulting Group)

The survey's author reports that "Linux users have clearly both adopted virtualization at a greater rate and embraced it to a greater extent than customers who have standardized on Microsoft operating systems," but why?

Perhaps the primary reason is that Microsoft didn't really start to promote virtualization until long after the Linux crowd. This isn't surprising: Microsoft has much to lose from virtualization. The fewer Windows server licenses an enterprise has to buy, the worse it is for Microsoft.

Microsoft has now jumped into the virtualization market with both feet, giving its Hyper-V product away for free...but not really. Indeed, it is the pricing strategy Microsoft has for its servers that may go furthest in explaining its lack of appeal to Windows users, as noted in Gabriel Consulting Group's report:

There are also licensing differences that bear directly on comparative costs. With Microsoft, users who don't have volume agreements or who haven't purchased the more expensive Enterprise or Datacenter editions will have to purchase licenses for every system and each of the virtual machines running on those systems. Linux, on the other hand, can be essentially free, meaning that companies can deploy it on multiple systems or in virtual machines at no cost.

While the survey also lists the benefits of source code access to Linux administrators, I suspect that this is of minimal value to the big majority of Linux adopters. Very few will care to "get intimate with the code," to use the report's language, preferring instead to stick to the more tangible (and easily accessed) cost savings from Linux virtualization.

There are other benefits to those who primarily adopt, or standardize on, Linux, as the report suggests:

• 77 percent of survey respondents reported greater hardware utilization rates through Linux virtualization, versus 56 percent of Windows users.
• Those who standardize on Linux find Linux virtualization much more manageable (62 percent) than Windows administrators who standardize on Windows virtualization (48 percent). More telling, four times as many Windows standardizers (23 percent) find Windows virtualization hard to manage than the Linux standardizers, only 6 percent of whom find Linux virtualization hard to manage.
• Linux translates into higher server utilization and, hence, less power consumption and more physical space: 59 percent of Linux administrators disagreed with the "We are rapidly running out of data center electrical capacity" statement, compared to 38 percent of Windows administrators. When presented with the statement "We are rapidly running out of data center floor space", 60 percent of Linux administrators disagreed versus 45 percent of Windows administrators.

While enterprises could realize even bigger cost savings by simply using free Linux versus paid Windows, most enterprises will buy commercial support for Linux through Red Hat, Novell, or Canonical. Even factoring in this cost, however, Linux seems to lend itself more readily to virtualization and, hence, to cost savings that result therefrom.

Microsoft has it in its power to turn the tide relative to Linux's superior virtualization TCO, and it probably has little to do with the cost of Windows Server, and certainly not with the cost of its Hyper-V virtualization technology, which is now $0.00.

Rather, it's likely a matter of simplifying its famously Byzantine pricing, and making Windows Server licensing friendlier to virtualization. For example, Microsoft doesn't allow migration of its products to a new physical server more than once every 90 days. This may ensure customers buy licenses with fewer restrictions, but it also appears to mean they simply buy fewer Microsoft licenses, period.

Given that commercial Linux isn't free, Microsoft doesn't need to make Windows free to make its Hyper-V virtualization more competitive with Linux virtualization. Simplification, it seems, would go quite far toward the goal of making Windows virtualization more palatable.