Microsoft is far from dead, but it's hemorrhaging on all sides, and particularly in markets closest to consumers like mobile where it is steadily losing market share.
As one example, though a potent one for me, a longtime friend and Microsoft employee/evangelist wrote on Facebook that he had finally capitulated and bought an iPhone.
Names and faces obscured to protect the innocent
(Credit: Matt Asay)This is a man who dutifully stuck to Windows Mobile while the rest of the world fled. He's a man who stood for years in front of angry hordes of anti-Microsoft developers and promoted his company.
He's now gone to the "dark side." Or the cool side, as the case may be.
Microsoft can hardly afford to lose its marketing mojo with mainstream enterprises and consumers (and boy, has it lost some with these ads), but when its own employees turn on it...? It's not looking good.
To stanch the bleeding and rediscover its glory years, Microsoft should take a page from Apple, a company that nearly imploded years ago only to rediscover its design and financial prowess.
Yes, from Apple.
The reason that the world gave Apple another lease on life is that it created lust-worthy products. The desire has become so intense that the markets starts to salivate, Pavlovian style, at the merest hint of Apple creating a tablet...or trash can. We will apparently buy whatever Apple sells, sight unseen.
Sure, Apple still has anemic market share compared with Microsoft. And, yes, Apple serves different markets--content with consumers while Microsoft owns the enterprise.
But this is cause for concern, not complacency.
The enterprise is increasingly becoming personal. Employees are being given more leeway about what technology they buy, and Macs and iPhones are increasingly within the general guidelines as to what enterprises will support.
They have to be. Employees demand these Apple products.
Microsoft generally makes technologies that consumers have to use. Apple makes technology that consumers want to use. Over the long haul, which position do you think will win? If you're recruiting the best and brightest, for which company do you think they'd want to work?
This isn't a suggestion that Microsoft should start shipping purple PCs. But it is a call for Microsoft to make more software that consumers want.
Yes, even within its core market of enterprise software. Enterprise software can be sexy. Well, sort of.
Look at Atlassian. It does phenomenally well by creating software like Jira that developers want to use. For that matter, Microsoft technology like SharePoint inspires the same reaction: it's not sexy in the Apple sense, but dramatically more usable than its curmudgeonly competitors like Documentum.
SharePoint, in a way, is Microsoft emulating Apple, albeit in a stodgy, enterprise sort of way.
Microsoft needs a lot more of it, and it needs to step up its game in mobile and other markets that directly touch consumers. Windows 7 is a good first step in reinventing the Windows brand. The company should go further.
$529. That's the price of Google's new Nexus One and admittedly a small price to pay for the eternal bliss promised by its backers.
(Credit:
Google)
If T-Mobile is willing to subsidize the cost of the Nexus One in return for a services contract, why isn't Google subsidizing the device, given that it's effectively a one-way trip into Google Land and all of its services?
Tom Foremsky rightly notes that "Nexus phone does nothing to challenge the power of the telcos," given that it leaves them in the position to dictate what customers can do with their phones.
He goes on to argue that Google should buy a telco and thereby assert control over the complete customer experience.
It's a nice thought (though completely out of keeping with Google's business model of leveraging others' infrastructure), but Google could get much of the way there, I suspect, by simply subsidizing the phone itself, thereby cutting into the telcos' leverage over their customers.
That's what the unlocked $529 version does, after all. It positions the customer to be one SIM card swap away from a new telco. It makes wireless competitive again.
TechCrunch groks this when it writes:
Is there any question what Google is doing here? They're taking the traditional mobile model in this country, where you first choose your carrier, and then choose your phone, and turning it upside down. It's what Apple started with the iPhone. But Google goes farther, because they already have multiple carriers....
Or, as Ars Technica's Jon Stokes argues, "Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL."
Bingo. And subsidizing the Nexus One would take this strategy even further.
Google "generates more money per unit of online end-user activity than any other Web-focused organization," writes Carmi Levy in BetaNews. Nexus One is an on-ramp to more online end-user activity and hence more money.
Why not subsidize that so as to keep that revenue stream safe from the prying hands of the telcos? And to head off Microsoft, which now has carte blanche to push forward with Project Pink?
Google is happily paying telcos as much as $25 to $50 per device to sell Android phones, as Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley indicates. Why not "pay" its customers to use them?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
For all the billions enterprises spend on IT each year, they arguably get far inferior software than Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other consumer Web companies make available for free. In part, the consumer Web can deliver exceptional value for so little because it piggybacks on the expensive infrastructure built by others.
Is it time for enterprise software to "pull a Google" and build solutions on the consumer Web?
Your new Enterprise Content Management/Collaboration system?
For those who think there must be some trade-off in software quality when brown-bagging with the consumer Web instead of using white-glove dining with expensive SAP or Oracle, they're right. There is.
But the trade-off favors consumer-facing applications, as Alfresco CTO and co-founder (and my colleague) John Newton highlights:
The whole idea of enterprise software in the 21st century seems anachronistic. The term enterprise really only took hold in the 90s in order to describe systems that were able to scale beyond the department. It meant big, powerful, flexible, but it also meant big, clunky, and expensive.
As Web 2.0 sites with their cheap (read free), simple, but scalable platforms scaled to millions of users in a matter of months, the whole idea of only being able to support thousands of users and take years to implement became ludicrous. Being enterprise--meaning you can support your heavyweight infrastructure of other enterprise parts--also seems less interesting when you consider that the largest databases on the planet run on MySQL using a concept called "Sharding."
Sure, there are problems with the consumer Web. ZDNet, for example, points out that Twitter's security model isn't fully formed yet, and could introduce security breaches into enterprise software that leverages it.
But let's not kid ourselves that enterprises aren't already at risk--and, perhaps, equally at risk--from the "secure, enterprise-grade" software they shell out thousands or millions of dollars for every year.
And let's also not pretend that enterprise workers are going to ignore the sleek, highly usable consumer Web in favor of the clunky systems IT foists upon them. They're not.
Nor should they. I already find myself communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners over Facebook and Twitter, and I imagine you are, too. It's simply more efficient that way.
Rather than fight this, IBM et al. should build applications on top of the consumer Web. Or maybe a security overlay is all that's needed. Something that secures the communication endpoints while leaving employees free to interact with their peers at other companies using the consumer Web.
Novell is doing this with its Pulse service for Google Wave, a testament to just how innovative software can be when it isn't locked behind a firewall by IT. Others should follow suit, and not create clones of the consumer Web as Tibco has with its Twitter clone, Tibbr.
Web 2.0 Journal notes six megatrends affecting enterprise IT, including now-familiar themes like open-source development and cloud computing. The consumer Web should be there, too. It may well be the future of enterprise software. And perhaps it should be.
Whether you're an open-source advocate or not, you likely run open-source applications on your laptop or desktop. From Firefox to VLC to Handbrake to Adium, some of the best applications for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux are open source.
The iPhone, however, is a relative wasteland for open source. Should Apple care?
There's no open-source app for that.
OStatic points to four good open-source applications currently available for the iPhone, including Funambol for sync functionality and WordPress for blogging, but these are the exception to the rule. A Google search turns up others, but few that match the quality of open-source applications available on the "desktop."
Why?
It can't be a question of open-source developers shrinking from the proprietary iPhone platform. Much of the best open-source application development already happens on proprietary platforms like Mac OS X and Windows.
It's also not a question of understanding: O'Reilly and others walk open-source developers through iPhone application development.
Even so, it could well be that open-source developers have resisted the closed nature of the iPhone development and distribution process. In this, they wouldn't be alone.
First, you need a Mac to write iPhone applications. While the open-source crowd has embraced the Mac, many developers won't want to leave their Windows or Linux machines. (XMLVM could offer an alternative, as well as enabling developers to write iPhone applications in languages more familiar to them, like Java, instead of Objective C.)
Beyond hardware and programming languages, there's still the burden of running the gauntlet of Apple's application approval process. Open-source development has tended to provide unfettered playgrounds for development like SourceForge and Google Code. iPhone development is anything but unfettered.
Yes, Apple opened the door a crack to open source when it stopped requiring an NDA for development, but the door must be opened wider.
Otherwise it stands to miss out on applications like VLC, the open-source media player (which actually wouldn't likely be approved by Apple due to its competitive nature with Apple's native iPhone media player).
You can get a fork of VLC (called VLC4iPhone), but not through the official Apple App Store, and only if you jailbreak your iPhone. Few mainstream users will choose this route to install applications.
Even fewer open-source developers will go this circuitous route to lead them there, as hinted by noted open-source luminary Doc Searls, which leaves the official App Store largely bereft of open-source applications. This is Apple's loss, and it is a loss to the general public.
Apple's iPhone browser is great, but we'd be better off if mobile Firefox gave it some competition, just as it has on the "desktop." Fring is nice, but I'd much rather have Adium running on my iPhone. And so on.
Open-source development could provide needed competition to the mostly proprietary applications that dominate the App Store. It also could supply fresh innovation.
CNET has reported that iPhone users and Google Android users have much in common in terms of their usage patterns and demographics. Their developer audiences, however, are increasingly different, and that's to Apple's hurt, especially as Android grows in market share.
Android, after all, stands to scoop up a significant swath of mainstream users by attracting both proprietary and open-source application development, while Apple's iPhone predominately serves the proprietary software set. That's the bulk of the market, to be sure, but it stifles the experimentation and innovation that open-source developers could be bringing to Apple's iconic iPhone.
Does Apple care?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Most entrepreneurs are lucky to sell one start-up. A chosen few manage to repeat the feat, building and selling two or more businesses. The folks at Zimbra have outdone them all, selling the same company...twice.
As Kara Swisher of All Things Digital reports, VMware is expected to soon announce the acquisition of open-source messaging company Zimbra from Yahoo. My own sources at VMware confirm the deal.
While Swisher's report gets the Zimbra ownership change correct, its indication of a distressed asset sale misses the mark.
It's true that Yahoo has never known what to do with Zimbra, leading it to shop the Zimbra business to various potential buyers, including Red Hat and Cisco Systems. But this is a reflection of Yahoo figuring out that it doesn't have a future in the enterprise, a place that Zimbra is increasingly calling home, after early success with Internet service providers such as Comcast.
You do the math.
(Credit: Matt Asay)Zimbra has delivered 100 percent subscriber growth, along with roughly 100 percent sales growth, according to sources close to Zimbra, through the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, much of that growth driven by sales to marquee enterprise customers such as Bechtel.
In other words, Zimbra is a growth asset, though the price paid by VMware is almost certainly lower than the $350 million paid by Yahoo in 2006. That's just the nature of valuing an asset carve-out versus a standalone company pre-recession.
Even so, Zimbra can be a highly strategic asset for VMware. It's not surprising that the virtualization specialist would be interested in Zimbra, especially as it seeks to differentiate its cloud offerings.
Last week, I wrote that an "application war is brewing in the cloud," a war that VMware, more than any other company, is set to launch with its acquisition of Zimbra. Infrastructure isn't enough of a competitive differentiator, especially since most applications aren't designed to run well in the cloud.
Customers, and particularly hosting and service providers, are therefore looking to their infrastructure vendors like VMware to sort out applications for them, or at least give them a head start.
This is where Zimbra comes in. The company's technology was designed from the start as a cloud application, and it should give VMware a viable contender to Microsoft Exchange to offer hosting and service providers, rather than having to peddle applications from cloud competitors like Microsoft and IBM.
With SpringSource, Hyperic, and its adoption of Linux, VMware was already increasingly the open alternative to the closed cloud offerings from Microsoft, IBM, and others. Now, with Zimbra, it is adding its ability to compete at the application level, while retaining its open-source approach.
It's a smart, bold approach. Ironically, it's also an indication that the first shot fired in cloud computing's infrastructure war looks an awful lot like an application.
Technology that requires a manual is technology that doesn't get used. At least, where mainstream users are concerned in the consumer and enterprise software markets. One of the lessons of the last 30 years of computing, and particularly in the rise of the consumer Web, is that ease-of-use trumps deep functionality most of the time.
The masses may be asses, but that's where the money is
They're easy. They're intuitive. They solve real problems for real people. And all without a single manual.
Can open source also deliver this kind of mindless (and productive) ease of use?
It's not a question of documentation. Documentation for many open-source projects is chronically weak, but then, most documentation for most software is pretty weak. It's not just an open-source problem.
It also doesn't matter that you and I find a given open-source project supereasy to use. The only thing that matters is what mainstream end-users think, because they're the ones who create meaningful markets.
The kind that adds up to billions in sales.
Good technology spreads virally, as Matrix Partners David Skok points out. It depends on users being able to adopt technology without really having to think about it, and then tell their friends.
It doesn't spread because of all the great things that technology could do...if only the user could figure it out. Gartner's Jeffrey Mann rails against "vendors [who] confus[e] 'You can use it to do that' with 'We designed it to do that'," and open-source advocates are guiltier of this than most.
It's not what the software can do. It's what it does. For normal people. Without training or user manuals.
The open-source world, but particularly the Linux 'desktop' crowd, attempts an end-run around this argument by pointing to some grandma, somewhere, who runs (or should run) Linux (or some other open-source project).
But this is the wrong sort of argument, and precisely the wrong way to attract mainstream users. Facebook is its own argument: it's immediately clear what it's for and how to use it. Google is the same. TiVo? Ditto. And so on.
Most people don't have any agenda for choosing technology other than a) it's easy and b) it lets me communicate/work with all their friends and family.
Such software just needs to work. With minimal or little training and no ideological motivation. At all.
Can open source deliver this sort of experience? Yes, but it doesn't happen nearly enough. Commercial open-source projects like MindTouch go a long way toward making enterprise technology easy to use, while community-led open-source projects like Handbrake and Adium make open source supereasy for consumers.
These are the exceptions, unfortunately, not the rule.
We need more efforts like Canonical's Ubuntu, which is placing a heavy emphasis on design. Every open-source project should have a UI designer involved. The focus of every project should be to be able to run with minimal or no prior training.
Even the ubertechnical projects focused on developers. If Microsoft teaches us anything, it's that there are far more "average" developers/IT administrators/architects/etc. than rock stars, and such people benefit from a nice UI rather than a nice command line.
It's time to get out of the weeds of open-source development to equally focus on the end-user experience. Open-source can do this, but it must become a priority.
Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.
It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.
Just give me my !%!%! apps, already!
Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.
Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don't have the luxury of waiting.
It's not enough for cloud vendors to build the infrastructure and pray, "Field of Dreams" style, that customers will come. They won't. Not without applications and a host of other issues worked out for them, not by them.
Even Google, born in the cloud, recognizes this. Instead of forcing government customers into its public cloud, the company is building a dedicated cloud for government organizations in the U.S. Google's reasoning?
We also want to do our part to make it easier for government to transition to cloud computing. We recognize that government agencies have unique regulatory and compliance requirements for IT systems, and cloud computing is no exception. So we've invested a lot of time in understanding government's needs and how they relate to cloud computing. To help meet those requirements we're taking two important steps....
One step is certification, and the other is dedicated hosting. As much as Google may hope that its other prospective Google Apps customers won't have "unique...requirements," they do (or think they do). it's a losing battle to tell them otherwise, at least in the short term. If an enterprise giant like GE demands a private cloud, GE is going to get it.
This same pragmatism will drive Google and other cloud-infrastructure providers to build out their application suites. Why? Because enterprises that move to the cloud expect to see applications follow them there. Today, however, most enterprise applications don't work well in the cloud, leaving would-be enterprises buyers all dressed up with nowhere to go, in terms of the ability to run desired applications.
Vendors are jockeying to satisfy this demand for cloud-based applications. Google is already well on its way with Gmail and the rest of its Apps, and has been in the market lately for more, but others like Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and IBM will be jumping into the M&A market to round out their offerings in order to deliver increasingly full application suites.
Microsoft has been actively courting developers to build cloud-ready applications for its Azure platform, while VMware bought into the Spring developer community for the same purpose. But in the winner-takes-most cloud platform war, the best short-term strategy is to provide applications, and not simply hope they get built.
Perhaps this is one reason IBM CEO Sam Palmisano claims to be undisturbed by Google's rise. IBM already has Lotus and more running in the cloud, and has a strong hold on enterprise wallets.
Some, like Red Hat or Amazon, may elect to sit it out and stick to their infrastructure-only guns, but such vows of paucity won't help potential service provider customers, and threaten to position them out of the longer-term battle for enterprise customers. Amazon can afford to refrain from seeking enterprise customers; Red Hat can't.
Microsoft is arguably best positioned in such a battle, at least from a portfolio perspective. After all, it has the applications--e.g., Exchange/Outlook, SharePoint, Office--that enterprises already use. What it doesn't have, at least, not yet, is experience running these applications in significant cloud deployments. But that will come.
Until it does, expect the big cloud-infrastructure vendors to buy competitive application offerings so as to distinguish their platforms to hosting and service providers. Sure, they can sell hosted Exchange, but that's a recipe for entrenching Microsoft in the cloud, just as happened on the "desktop" and server. Cisco et al. don't have much appetite for reliving Microsoft's glory.
Who are the likely targets? Zoho just became belle of the ball, of course, but there are others. I'd expect any application with either a significant following, like Acquia's Drupal, or significant cloud/hosting experience, like SugarCRM (Disclosure: I am an adviser to SugarCRM), to be up for grabs.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Cloud computing is still more attractive to venture capitalists than it is to enterprise IT buyers, and that's unlikely to change in 2010. As IT buyers warm to the idea and implementation of cloud computing, 2010 is going to prove to be a very big year for cloud-computing M&A as big-fish vendors like VMWare, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle round out their cloud product portfolios with little-fish innovators.
Computing (and M&A) heads for the cloud
Some, like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, suggest that cloud computing is simply a fad, one that attempts to solve many of the same problems that SOA, EDI, etc. already attempted to fix.
Tell that to the buyers. Gartner expects the cloud-related SaaS market to top $8 billion in 2009, which suggests that real customers paying real money.
They may not be paying enough, however, to support the mushrooming cloud vendor marketplace. Not yet.
Industry insiders are predicting a shakeout as pre-recession venture funding runs out for many of the early cloud vendors, forcing them into the arms of buyers or bankruptcy courts.
This is the inevitable separation of wheat from chaff, and it's a very good thing for an industry that has been long on hype and short on delivery to date.
But don't confuse the hype with vaporware. And don't for a minute think that any of the big (or small) vendors has a complete offering yet. As IDC research director Dan Yachi posits:
Cloud computing is more than just buzz. It is here to stay and is expected to take increasing shares of total IT spending worldwide. From a VC perspective, the even better news is that cloud computing is still far from maturity. There are many technology gaps that are not yet filled, especially in the areas of cloud enablement, management, monitoring, and security. In particular, VCs can find investment opportunities in start-up companies that develop solutions for hybrid cloud, which is expected to experience increased demand over the coming years.
Cloud computing offers real advantages, and has attracted a significant array of pent-up demand. Start-up vendors like Cloudera, VMOps, Rightscale, and others are inundated with requests for pilot projects as enterprise IT dips some very big toes into the cloud-computing water.
Indeed, it is start-ups like these that will help bridge the gulf between cloud hype and cloud practice in 2010, as the big vendors round out their offerings with the start-ups' technology.
Who will be bought? Those that solve real-world IT problems, not simply those that offer enterprises the ability to build private clouds or give them an on-ramp to public clouds.
Take VMOps, for example. The company's product suite enables service providers and others to build out private clouds. Where it becomes particularly interesting, however, is in the details.
While it sounds great to build a private cloud within an enterprise, the reality is that its resources will be funded by a number of different groups. There's no such thing as a common pool of funding in big enterprises. Among other things, VMOps has management tools for handling billing/resource allocation within private cloud deployments.
This sort of real-world understanding makes its cloud tools much more practical and, hence, much more interesting than those from competing vendors that may solve the technical difficulty of building a cloud but overlook the practical problems of managing it on a day-to-day basis.
Or, as Appiro predicts for 2010, "The real innovation will be in the business of cloud computing, not the technology."
This is why 2010 will be the year when the big vendors buy up innovative start-ups, in terms of both technology and business acumen, that help to make cloud computing reality, not theory, as cloud computing leaves the labs and becomes accepted practice in forward-looking enterprises.
It's a trend that should make enterprise IT very happy...and venture capitalists even happier.
Canonical, creator of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has taken its share of criticism for not being innovative enough for some in the Linux community. In 2010, however, Canonical's focus on design and packaging will come to be seen as a seriously shrewd strategy as it helps to take Linux to the masses.
The reason? The innovation that pays is changing, and UI matters more and more.
When we think of innovation, we normally think of traditional research and development (R&D), complete with a white-coated scientist or pizza-gobbling engineer.
As Apple, Google, and other highly successful software companies demonstrate, however, today's innovation opportunities may lie more in user interface than traditional R&D. Google's emissary to the start-up world, Don Dodge, hints at this in a discussion of the various email systems he has used:
[O]ver my career, my first email thing was Vax Mail, which was awesome at the time, it was revolutionary. I went from Vax Mail, to Outlook, to Lotus Notes when I was working for Ray Ozzie, then back to Outlook again, and now Gmail. Email is a pretty straightforward application. They have basically the same features, it's all a question of user interface.
Sure, there are differences under the hood between Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Outlook, but the innovation that matters most today may well be the "superficial" e-mail experience that these different systems offer.
Back to Canonical and Ubuntu.
Canonical's founder, Mark Shuttleworth, understands that innovation is shifting from core research to the user experience, as he's opined on his blog. He has set his sights high, not content to replicate the Windows PC or Mac experience, for example, but has instead insisted on surpassing it.
The money for Canonical is in packaging open-source technology, not necessarily in creating the technology in the first place. The Linux world should be grateful, given Red Hat's and Novell's focus on the data center.
Linux benefits when mainstream users buy into it. Or, rather, when they use it without thinking about "it."
No one cares that their TiVo devices runs Linux. It just does. No one cares that the Kindle runs Linux, either. They care about the functionality these devices deliver. That's the way it should be.
Canonical's opportunity is to make Linux so easy that it becomes completely invisible to the end user. And Canonical may well be the best positioned to do this, among its open-source peers.
Neither Red Hat nor Novell employs an executive to focus on consumer products. Canonical does. No other open-source company has had its CEO discard the executive mantle to "focus [his] Canonical energy on product design," as Canonical recently did.
Hence, perhaps no other open-source vendor is better positioned to capitalize on the rising (and changing) Netbook market or other open-source friendly consumer markets.
Red Hat dominates the enterprise Linux market. Let it.
Canonical could well be set to dominate the consumer Linux market, a potentially massive market that demands a single-minded focus on design. It's a big bet, but one that Shuttleworth is committed to making.
Open source has long been an important development methodology. The biggest surprise of 2009, however, was just how quickly it took center stage as a business strategy in the larger software economy.
The secret is out: open source is big business.
It's not as if open source as a business strategy is anything new. After all, the industry has been chattering about the business benefits of open source for nearly 10 years.
But not on Google scale. And not with the cachet and brand of Google blessing the idea. Despite the impressive sales and profits that Red Hat and other traditional open-source companies consistently deliver, the industry needed Google to take open source out of the realm of geekdom and into the boardroom.
Even Google needed Google. The Mountain View software and advertising giant has been involved with open source for years, running its Summer of Code and hiring up the best and brightest open-source developers, like Guido van Rossum and Greg Stein.
In 2008, however, Google stopped treating open source like a cute science project and source of cheap raw materials to power its search business, and instead started to actively court developers.
Open source stopped being a sideshow for Google and instead became the main event.
The developers were needed to create a groundswell of support for Google products like Android, and to dismantle the house that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer built.
It's working. In fact, I suspect it's working far better than even Google suspected it would. It's certainly working at a scale that I never imagined we'd see in 2009.
All of which makes me think that 2010 will be the year that the rest of the industry follows Google's lead and starts to use open source as a fundamental business strategy, and not simply a plaything to placate "the community."
So, instead of Microsoft experimenting with fringe products like its open-source CMS Oxite, perhaps we'll see Microsoft open source an ad server (or acquire OpenX?) in an attempt to open-source Google's core, just as Google has been opening up Android, Chrome OS, and other products that undermine Microsoft's profit centers.
Perhaps we'll see SAP open-source software that kidney punches Oracle, while Oracle finally gets its way with MySQL and uses it to sucker-punch Microsoft's SQL Server.
And so on.
The big surprise of 2009 was how open source stepped up its game to become Google's primary business strategy, and not simply a sideshow developer strategy. The big news of 2010 will be how quickly other technology vendors will follow its lead, making 2010 the year of mountains of new, open-source code...and a hugely entertaining spectacle.
