Opening up in self-interest of Google, Microsoft

Microsoft is launching an open-source foundation. Google is promising to keep user data portable. Both moves seem to cut against the financial self-interest of the two technology giants. Have the gods gone crazy, or are the business strategies of the industry's biggest players more subtle than "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"?

With a steady adoption of open-source business and development strategies, Microsoft has gone from open-source hater to open-source embracer in just a couple of years:

• Created its own open-source foundation, the CodePlex Foundation.
• Launched CodePlex, an open-source project-hosting site.
• Started actively contributing to outside open-source projects, including those of the Apache Software Foundation, which it also financially supports.
• Embeds open-source code such as JQuery into its own products.
• Releases complementary open-source projects to augment its customer relationship management software, SharePoint, and other products.
• Received "unanimous approval" by the Open Source Initiative for a few open-source licenses.

This isn't to whitewash all that Microsoft has not done well vis-a-vis open source (e.g., I'm not a fan of its patent-licensing arrangements, including the "interoperability" agreement with Novell), but clearly, Microsoft has been actively adopting open source as part of its business strategy. I'll address the "Why?" question below.

Google, for its part, has long supported open-source software. And it's easy to see why: the company makes its money from data, not software. The more people that have access to a great Web experience through Firefox or Chrome, or have computer access through low-cost Chrome OS-based Netbooks, the better, as they'll almost inevitably find their way to data-rich services from Google.

Google, in other words, has a strong interest in promoting open source and closed data.

All of this makes Google's Data Liberation Front--"an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products--so intriguing. The DLF appears to be giving away Google's single best option for monetizing its user base.

(Credit: Google)

What is Google thinking? One answer may be that Google is trying to head off government scrutiny and intervention. As CNET News' Tom Krazit posits, "anything Google can do to show that it isn't planning to create an impenetrable fortress surrounding user data, it's going to do."

That's one cynical and likely accurate view. But I think that there's more to the story.

Google has created an array of services that increasingly dominate their respective markets. Consumers and businesses are apparently very happy to give more of their time and attention to Google products.

As such, Google's primary concern revolves around keeping those users from leaving. While the DLF makes it easier for customers to leave Google, it also obviates the need to do so. So long as Google customers feel sure that they can leave on their own terms, they likely won't.

Microsoft is starting to learn the same thing. Its customers tend to use Microsoft products because they work, not because some evil genius in Redmond dreamed up diabolical ways to keep them locked in through closed file formats.

Don't believe me? Look at Microsoft's support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a new content standard that promises to do for content management systems what SQL did for the database market. CMIS enables information portability between different content repositories. (Disclosure: Alfresco, my employer, was a founding member of CMIS, along with IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and others.)

In other words, CMIS makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint into, say, Documentum. It also enables application vendors to write to the CMIS standard, rather than specifically to SharePoint.

CMIS Interoperability Standard

(Credit: Microsoft, EMC, IBM)

Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories?

Because Microsoft knows that it can win.

Take Microsoft's pre-CMIS partnership with Documentum. As CMS Watch anecdotally references, SharePoint is much easier to use than Documentum, making any partnership/integration between the two a largely one-way street from Documentum to SharePoint, just one reason that SharePoint has boomed, even as the economy has busted. This is only going to get better for Microsoft with CMIS interoperability.

Interoperability favors the vendor whose products are easier to use. By opening up, Microsoft is opening its doors to more customers and, hence, more money.

Google and Microsoft aren't supporting open source or open standards or open data because they grew up as Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts, and feel that it's the right thing to do.

Rather, they're increasingly engaged in open business strategies because they recognize the financial rewards that can stem from doing so. Openness is not a religion; it's a business strategy--a strategy that Microsoft and Google are learning to play too.

[forever4now]

Microsoft is clearly dragging their feet on browser standards, in order to entrench their proprietary Silverlight on the web (aka lock-in on the web).

Try the following Acid3 test, on IE 8 (or earlier) and compare the results to Firefox 3.5, Chrome 2, Safari 4 and/or Opera 10 (see Wikipedia, for a description of Acid3).

http://acid3.acidtests.org/

You should see results, something like this:

Chrome 2.0 - 100/100
Safari 4.0 - 100/100
Opera 10 - 100/100
Firefox 3.5.3 - 93/100
IE 8 - 20/100

Does that sound like a new Microsoft, to you?

[eadeguzman]

Good point. But you're off-topic.

You're confusing standards with open source. Nothing in the article mentions standards, browser, Silverlight, etc...

Most of the development still happens outside the browser.

[Random_Walk]

Correction on the OSI approval - from your link:

"The decision to approve was informed by the overwhelming (though not unanimous) consensus from the open source community that these licenses satisfied the 10 criteria of the Open Source definition, and should therefore be approved."

IOW, not unanimous :)

re: "Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories?"

Probably because they find it easier to exert control over data portability by actively being a part of the committee than by being passive or absent from it. Note that this is not a knock on Microsoft per se - it actually makes perfect business sense. If an entity sees a potential threat, they are best served by actively engaging with it, instead of fortifying and preparing for an eventual clash. In this case, Microsoft can guide the outcome to something favorable to their own interests.

Besides, all that interoperability they've assisted in can disappear in less time than it takes to write a service pack to SharePoint, .NET, or both - so it does them no harm to make nice at this early stage of the game.

[eadeguzman]

Microsoft goes where the developers are. I think they are sensing that most developers are attracted to open source so they need to be in that game to be able to compete for developer attention. I believe that Microsoft is first and foremost a developer tools company... Without developer tools (Visual Studio) neither Windows nor Office would be as successful.

> all that interoperability they've assisted in can disappear in less time than it takes to write a service pack

That's will be suicide at this point, if they choose to do that at that would be a big turn-off from developers (even those who are not contributing to open source projects). Besides, the code they deliver and presented as "open source", I believe, cannot be taken back.

[richard993]

I doubt you will find any of the flagship products in open source from any of the big vendors (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google). In fact, most of the source code that these vendors have release are either because they were forced to (through GPL licensing or other licensing models), or because the source code that they release will improve their market position through an increased number of applications developed on their platforms.
For example, you won't find Google's search engine or their search algorithms in open source. You won't find Microsoft Windows in open source, nor will you find either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle 11g database servers. And where is DB2 or MQSeries, I don't see these products being open sourced. Apple OS X? no sign of any open source there! iTunes? nope. and what about the iPhone? nope.

It's hard to take these companies seriously when the only things they open source are useless peripheral code. It's great that Linux, MySQL, Apache, and many of the other projects are open. It's just a shame that a closed operating system such as Microsoft Windows are the defacto standard on the desktop. It's also rather pathetic how many of these open source projects are not taken up by large corporations because of political reasons, or because of the lack of support and uncertainy that comes with a lot of these open source projects (some of which are no longer maintained). Oh well. I guess those are good enough reasons why Microsoft (and other vendors) continues to succeed with closed source.