Ballmer's false choice: Open source or free soda
Someday Steve Ballmer will descend from Sinai to find that the natives have grown very restless. In the meantime, it would be interesting to discover with whom he talks, since his understanding of open source continues to be seriously flawed.
At a recent Minority Student Day, a student asked Ballmer if Windows would ever go open source. "No" was the immediate response, with this tacked on for good measure:
An open-source version of Windows would mean not only would we publish Windows source code, we would make it free. That's what open source means. We wouldn't be hosting Minority Student Day if we open-source Windows because we wouldn't have enough profit to pay people, let alone invite in people from the community.
I'm not saying open-source is a bad thing, but it doesn't pay the bills in this company, so we can't embrace that way of doing things. ... We give out free soda pop to everybody who works here. We make our stuff free, people gotta give back the soda pop -- it's just inconsistent with what we do around here.
Ignorance, thy name is Ballmer.
Ballmer's statement, however, may be true on one level, but it's a level that is irrelevant going forward: It may well be that Microsoft-sized profits aren't possible selling open-source bits. Of course, this obscures the fact that Google and others happily build businesses on open source and make Microsoft-esque profits. It's all in figuring out what to sell.
Microsoft's model of selling software is a 20th-century model that will continue to work for it until enterprises discover that they now live in the 21st Century when software is free (but services are not). The model going forward is to give away the core code and charge for services around that software. This is Google's model. It's also Red Hat's, Alfresco's, Facebook's, etc.
Giving away Windows wouldn't necessarily make it "free" (as in soda). That's just Ballmer being obtuse. He's a relic of yesterday's software model. He made a ton of money for himself and for shareholders and the residual of that model will feed many mouths with free soda for years.
But it's yesterday's model, for yesterday's companies. Microsoft might have noticed that it hasn't proved to be relevant in any of the 21st Century's businesses. Its bid for Yahoo! won't change this unless Microsoft changes the way it views its software business.
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. 
Gary, http://www.gara.com/
Sure, their applications are available for users without charge, but that has nothing to do with them being open source.
- by freddlockk March 12, 2008 7:03 PM PDT
- I Always thought highly of CNET, despite disagreeing with their writers sometimes. This time I must say, I am completely dumbfounded by this guy's takes on corporate software companies. I am fully aware of Microsoft's practices being overly aggressive, but this is just ridiculous. Only a hollow-minded individual with no professional experience would write something this lopsided! This is like straight out of comedy central, seriously.
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(8 Comments)Fist of all, since you seem to miss Ballmer's humor, he was just making light of the fact they give their employees free soda (and starbucks coffee, btw). Second, since it is apparent this person has not worked at a company bigger than maybe three people, let me say that large companies CANNOT actually make money by writing open source software. Microsoft (or Google, or whoever else) would not be able to keep 70,000 people employed by writing free code. Third, Google code is not exactly open source. They write something for you to use called API's (no letter on API stands for open source). If it is, please let me know how I can get my hands on the Google Search algorithm. I could really use it for a project at work. Companies like Google and Yahoo! live off advertising and other services such as Google enterprise search services, which companies actually pay thousands of dollars for. So if even Google does it, why can't Microsoft? Do you want your Operating System to have embedded advertising? Maybe then, Microsoft, or any other software manufacturers will be able to offer free code. Probably a viable option, since this guy has a distorted version of reality and would not even notice the ads.
Please Matt, get with the program. Read a little more on how big companies actually make a profit or maybe... give getting a real job a try!
Let's start a petition to get this guy off of CNET. A guy with such hollow, subjective ideas does not belong here.