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Microsoft has admitted that it fears open source. Why? Because it has yet to learn to harness it.
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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 general manager of the Americas division and 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.
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But I have to disagree on the current level of competition that Microsoft is getting from open source.
OpenOffice has 24% market share in parts of Europe. Apache HTTP has 50% market share. OS X is based on an open source kernel. SharePoint has to compete with Alfresco and other open source portals. SQLServer has to compete with not only MySQL but open source ETL, reporting, and OLAP technologies. In some of these cases open source is limiting Microsoft's growth. This does not make their revenue go down over time, but it is down compared to what it could be.
As I said on Savio's blog Microsoft's battle with Google is a conventional war that they know how to fight, but their battle with open source needs to be fought with weapons and tactics that the company is not used to.
A combination of the economy and competition from open source, Google, and other places has affected their last quarterly statement. Compared with the same quarter last year revenue is up by less than 0.5%, total operating expenses is up 58%, operating income is down 49%, and net income is down 12%.
- by johnericanderson May 29, 2008 7:43 AM PDT
- Competition is good. It drives innovation, both in Open source communites and at Redmond.
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