Microsoft's quarter booms--when will open source make a dent?
Microsoft sure is taking its time dying. What with open-source cutting it off at the knees and all, I would have expected it to be packing its bags and heading home. But no, the company continues to frustrate my prophecies with great earnings. Microsoft's only weak area was online. Everything else is booming to the tune of $4.29 billion in profit.
Which begs the question: who wins in the standoff between open source and proprietary software? And when?
In the short term, the answer is clearly that open source and proprietary vendors will coexist relatively peacefully because there's still plenty of room for Oracle's consolidation play, Microsoft's ecosystem play, and IBM's...IBM play ("We're IBM, always have been, and always will be, so buy from us"). Open source has plenty of room to grow without unduly upsetting these three.
I don't think we'll have any head-on friction between these major players and open source until an open-source ecosystem player emerges. That's likely to be Red Hat, but not yet. It's fair to say that a commercial open-source ecosystem won't fully emerge until there are more "commercials" (money) involved. With MySQL angling toward $100 million and an IPO, we might not be that far off.
But a few years, anyway.
In the meantime, it's likely that open source will continue to skirmish with and beat the individual proprietary players (those not affiliated with Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM), but leave the Big Three (Big Four if we count SAP, which is increasingly plausible as it consolidates, too) relatively unscathed. For now. The writing is on the wall, however, as Microsoft's bellicose positioning against open source shows.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
But then you reach the last paragraph and all the good logic gets blown out of the water with one assinine piece of "proof" that Microsoft is "scared" of Open Source.
Why? because they invested some minute amount into paying Open Source some lip service? Could it be for any other reason, like open source is Microsoft's new Apple? Remember how stunned people were when Microsoft made an investment in Apple, essentially keeping that company viable somewhere around 10 years ago? Was it because Microsoft was "afraid" of Apple? No, of course not, it helped prop up, a puppet "viable" competitor that kept Microsoft from being a "monopoly"
Apple is no longer a "third world" competitor any longer, so Microsoft needs some fresh places to "invest" in "competition" to keep regulators from... well regulating them.
Free Open Office? Oh great, get a few people using it, and "Office" is no longer monopolistic. And should something come along that like, they learn from it, and incorporate it into their own offering, else they just acquire the company. Just look at their history. How many products did Microsoft build from the ground up without an acquisition or at least being charged with "ripping off" somebody elses idea and just improving upon it?
The Open Source projects out there, just increased exponentially the number of "competitors" Microsoft can claim they have, while give them fertile soil to wait for the next big idea to come along (allowing open source investors to foot the bill for this "R&D" operation), and when that idea hits, if they can't buy it, they will just replicate it. Done. Scared? I doubt it.