Microsoft may have an innovation problem, but it has hubris nailed.
Take, for example, John Mangelaars, a Microsoft regional vice president, in an interview with CIO magazine. Mangelaars dispenses with niceties, arguing that Google and Microsoft are the only two games in town and that the stakes are immense:
Is it Google's world?
[Between Microsoft and Google it will be a] Battle of the Titans for who becomes the platform of the world.
And you thought it was just software....
In this case, Mangelaars may not be stretching the truth. There is a great deal at stake, and it really is about who serves as gatekeeper of the Web.
My question? Do we really want either company filling that role? Microsoft monopolizing the desktop did no one any favors, and Microsoft or Google monopolizing the Web won't be any better.
Or Microsoft's? Or yours?
It's not a question of who is or isn't evil. It's about the dangers inherent in centralizing control in any one entity.
The problem, unfortunately, is that few people or organizations think about this when making IT decisions. However much the open-source community talks up its ability to reduce or eliminate vendor lock-in, the reality is that consumers and enterprises choose technology based on near-term utility, not long-term choice.
About the only time vendors converge on open standards to ensure customer choice is when it suits their desires to dislodge a too-powerful vendor, as the HTML5 crowd is doing to Adobe's Flash or as IBM et al. have done with Linux to break Microsoft's Windows grip. In these cases, it's not really about customer choice so much as about giving vendors more choices.
I wonder, therefore, when we're going to see the industry rally to an open platform--what this means and who/what it will mean, I don't know--to keep Google or Microsoft from claiming too much control over the Web. Unfortunately, it almost certainly won't happen until it's almost too late, just as happened on the "desktop."
Why can't we learn?
The technology we call innovative will seem pedestrian to our children.
From touch screens to open source, our kids are being conditioned to interact with technology in ways we hardly expected even a decade ago, despite what "The Jetsons" foreshadowed back in the '60s.
Hey, kids, I can make you cool!
This thought came to me from two directions yesterday. The first was a text message my 13-year old daughter sent me:
BTW bring more Ubuntu stickers if possible. I wore my Ubuntu shirt today and a ton of nerds complimented me on it. Apparently people love Ubuntu. I think that if I ever have any problem at school, I'll be backed up. I love you so much.
When she has worn her Apple shirt before, she gets the same sort of reaction, albeit from a different section of her school's population. I suspect she wouldn't get the same sort of reception with a Windows 7 shirt: I doubt people would care. Microsoft simply doesn't inspire that sort of emotion.
This prompted a second reaction to the changing face of technology. It seems clear that Bing and Xbox notwithstanding, the Redmond giant has abdicated its innovative urge, as former Microsoft tablet executive Dick Brass opined recently:
Microsoft's huge profits--$6.7 billion for the past quarter--come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.'s, Microsoft can't count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.
Those best and brightest work at Google or Apple now, and/or they work on open-source projects.
Don't believe me? Run a random sample of the world's Web companies like Facebook. In them you'll discover a penchant for Apple, Google, and open source, and an average age below 30. There's a youthquake going on, and it doesn't bode well for Microsoft.
Yes, Microsoft still claims 18 percent of the U.S. smartphone market and gargantuan shares of the "desktop" operating system and office productivity suite markets, not to mention healthy shares in the enterprise server, database, and collaboration markets.
But today's children don't see those things. They don't use Excel or SQL Server or .Net. They use Facebook, iPhones, and, if they're technically inclined, open source. Microsoft and Apple can give technology away to inculcate themselves in the minds of children, but they can't make it as easily accessible and pliable as open source does.
Or won't.
Apple is somewhat shielded from the open-source onslaught because it's perceived as ubercool. Kids like that. Heck, adults do, too. But Microsoft doesn't have the coolness factor. This is perhaps an asset with the old-school enterprise crowd, but it's a crippling factor in raising tomorrow's workforce to prefer Microsoft.
Google gets it. Microsoft does not.
There are many reasons to take this position, but the two companies' outdoor advertising in London is enough for me.
Google's ads focus on real people doing real things with the company's technology. Microsoft's...well, I'm not really sure what Microsoft's ads are supposed to do other than make people feel like they somehow are responsible for Windows.
Is that a good thing?
Here is an ad I saw in the Pimlico Tube station this morning for Google Chrome:
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
And here's a Microsoft ad similar to several that I saw at Victoria Station this morning:
(Credit:
Microsoft via The New York Times)
Microsoft seems to want to be the everyman of operating systems. Google seems to want to just help people get their work and browsing done efficiently. At least, those are the messages I take from their respective advertising campaigns.
As a consumer, I know what to do with Google's message. I have no idea what to do with Microsoft's, except perhaps feel proud (or ashamed, as the case may be).
Microsoft still fixates on making itself the center of the user's universe, while Google gets out of the way so that users can experience the Web. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Google is the one growing and innovating strongly, while Microsoft keeps milking businesses first launched decades ago.
If you're a Google Nexus One user, you experienced a bit of magic last week.
In one click of an over-the-air update, your Nexus One became an iPhone--offering the ability to pinch and expand the screen to zoom in or out.
Can you spot the OS in this picture?
Just one click, with little to no user intervention. That's what operating systems look like in the 21st century, a future more clearly playing out in mobile than in the more traditional realms of personal computers and servers.
Apple is leading the way on this, but application developers have been quick to pick up on the trend.
Consider, for example, Apple's forthcoming iPad. According to Funambol's Fabrizio Capobianco:
The iPad is a new paradigm of human-computer interaction. The desktop is gone. The folders are gone. The documents live inside the app. The device transforms itself in the object it becomes. It is a non-object. It is what you want it to be. One touch on an icon, it is a calculator. No folders, no files, just numbers as if you were holding a calculator. One touch and it is a notepad. One touch and it is a picture frame. It is the future of computing.
The iPad is the replacement of the home desktop computer.
Why? Because it simplifies the user experience to what they actually want to do, removing all the complexity as to how it is actually done. Open-source developers have been slow to pick up on this, thinking that everyone wants to muck around in source code, or at least have the ability to do so.
We don't. Not average users. We just want our machines to work for us. We don't want to have to work for them.
Facebook gets this, and particularly so in its mobile incarnation. On the personal computer, Facebook is relatively easy but a bit too cluttered, a bit too PC-like. On the iPhone, Facebook is magically simple to use. Facebook was made for this "operating system-free" world.
No wonder Facebook is the king of mobile, according to studies of mobile usage.
In this post-PC, post-OS world, can open source play a leading role?
I think so, as does Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. But it's going to require a very different kind of open source than we've hitherto experienced. We need open-source development communities that demonstrate keen appreciation for end-user requirements, with as much emphasis on user interfaces as underlying architecture.
We need to create the same sort of "magic" that Apple does, the kind that makes former Red Hat marketing lead Chris Grams suggest that "no company can make more folks put their beliefs aside for a shiny new object quicker than Apple."
Open source needs that shiny-ness, without the sacrifice of freedom.
We're already starting to deliver, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols notes, but we need to do better. We need to be less Dickens, to borrow from Gartner analyst Thomas Otter, and more revolutionary.
Here's where to begin: stop thinking about the OS and start thinking about the network. Call it cloud or whatever you like, but the magic of the iPhone is not in its OS. It's in the fact that the iPhone OS gets out of the way as users connect with the Internet in increasingly interesting ways.
Open source is a child of the Internet. Linux is the first true network operating system. All that is still needed, therefore, is to eradicate the fixation with file systems and other remnants of the 20th-century PC and then look beyond to the network--one that happily runs Linux, but in the background, letting the user experience the Web and its applications first and foremost and not worry about how the application is running.
Apple can do this because it isn't concerned about selling OSes. That's not where the money is. One of the reasons Microsoft so often stumbles is because it is chained to its decades-old Windows revenue stream, as former executive Dick Brass recently opined.
Guess what? Open source is more Apple than Microsoft in this respect. We don't need to monetize the OS. Linux is free.
Now we just need to focus on innovation, and by "innovation" I don't mean coming up with "gee whiz!" shiny, new objects. Open source can follow Apple's (and Microsoft's) lead, as Gavin Clarke writes in The Register:
In the past, and even with some of the new ideas like Bing and Azure and a hosted version of Office, it's been a case of Microsoft following others. One of its strengths, like Apple, has been in taking an existing idea and making it work better as it did on Windows and Office in the 1980s and 1990s. Not so much innovating the new, as innovating the existing.
So, it's a question of focus. Focus on the user. That's not to say that developers go by the wayside, but that the most successful commercial open-source projects will be those that remember who their customers are, not just who their development community is.
As we do this, we can surpass Apple in refining the future of the operating system, letting applications, and particularly Web applications, dominate the computing experience, instead of making customers plod through file systems and other remnants of a bygone era.
For some, the definition of software freedom begins and ends with source code. Such people have apparently never heard of market competition.
It's arguably even more important, and doesn't necessarily derive from a software license (though it's no doubt better when protected by an open-source license).
Over the last few weeks, we've seen signs that key open-source vendors are waking up to this fact, with both Canonical (Ubuntu) and Mozilla (Firefox) sniffing around Yahoo/Microsoft to replace Google with Yahoo/Bing as their default search engine.
Choice, you see, is good, even when it's not created by an open-source license.
In the case of Google, its search technology is 100 percent proprietary. Yes, the open-source world prefers Google, but letting that preference turn into a fixation is both bad business and bad policy.
It creates too much reliance on one vendor. That's not good for software freedom, and certainly not for market freedom, no matter how "not evil" we might presume Google to be.
Apple, the uber-proprietary technology giant, gets this. That's why it, too, is looking to lock Google out of its iPhone, as BusinessWeek has reported. The more Apple competes with Google, the better Microsoft looks as Apple's "pawn" to keep Google's search dominance at bay.
It's not about loving Microsoft. It's about preserving options...and competition.
With ZDNet, I applaud Google's efforts to take on Apple in key markets like smartphones where Apple increasingly dominates. I don't want to serve an Apple monopoly any more than I liked living under a Microsoft monopoly.
Apple, even more than Microsoft before it, is committed to a proprietary path, one that threatens to stifle outside innovation and becomes more proprietary with every product release.
But I also don't want a Google monopoly. While I deeply respect Google's open-source credentials, it is not necessarily always the model open-source citizen, as its experience with Android suggests.
In a perfect world, open source would create the "magic" that wins over consumers and fuels new markets.
Until we arrive at that perfect world, however, there's good old-fashioned competition, which sometimes, indeed often, will have nothing to do with source-code licensing and everything to do with market competition.
As arguably the world's largest open-source company, Google has a big stake in maintaining its place at the heart of the open-source ecosystem. Recent events, however, suggest that Google can't rest on its laurels if it wants to secure the hearts and minds of open-source developers.
Make no mistake: Google needs those developers. Android, Chrome (and Chrome OS), and other Google initiatives depend upon fostering vibrant open-source communities that can help it to surpass Microsoft and Apple.
Does Google need to search for new friends?
There have been rumblings that Mozilla would look to Google alternatives for the default search engine within Firefox, despite Mozilla pulling in 91 percent of its revenues from its Google partnership. Mozilla employee Asa Dotzler, though not speaking for the foundation, says that he'd welcome a switch from Google given its rising dominance over the Web.
Mozilla executive Mitchell Baker, for her part, has noted that alternatives (Yahoo, Microsoft) would likely pay Mozilla more money and give Firefox shelter from Google, which has been building a rival browser, Chrome.
If Mozilla needs a nudge, Canonical just gave it one, defaulting to Yahoo search for future versions of its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.
Mozilla and Canonical represent the heart of the open-source community. If they move from Google, it paves the way for other communities to do so, too.
Mozilla and Canonical arguably have their financial self-interest at heart in such deals, but Gartner Research Vice President Brian Prentice points out an even bigger issue that could drive a wedge between Google and the wider open-source community:
Patents.
Google, after all, was recently granted a patent on its MapReduce parallel programming model. This puts the Apache Software Foundation Hadoop project firmly in its sights, even if Google likely has no intention to sue. It's the uncertainty that may end up hurting the open-source community.
Prentice queries whether
So, does that mean that it's only a matter of time before Google's legal team starts sending out letters seeking license fees? I don't know. And that's the point. No one else does either.
I would suggest to you all that the greatest threat to any open system is, in fact, uncertainty. And what Google has done here is to dump a whole lot of uncertainty onto the market.
To those asking Google to submit such patents to a commons to ensure they are only used for defensive purposes, Google's response, as Prentice goes on, effectively amounts to "trust us - after all we're not evil."
Don't get me wrong: Google is and will likely remain a very strong proponent of open-source software, with projects like Chrome that impress and push the boundaries of innovation.
But in its rush to serve a wide variety of customer needs, it may end up overlooking or stepping on its erstwhile partners (like Mozilla), and could pursue policies (like its MapReduce patent or even its H.264 video codec stance) that threaten the open-source community just as much as Microsoft has.
Google is powerful, but it still needs friends. Open source has been a chief ally of Google to date. Will it remain such? That's an open question.
Never have developers mattered more. As Apple readies its tablet announcement party for later Wednesday morning, the big question remaining is whether developers will join, or whether they'll join Google's Android and Chrome initiatives.
It's Apple vs. Google. And it's all about developers.
Microsoft has ruled the software market for decades because it won the hearts and minds of developers. But Microsoft has been slipping lately, and Apple has eagerly taken its place. Despite some early fits and starts, Apple has consistently given developers ways to make piles of cash, even as a global marketplace for mobile applications has expanded.
Developers have returned the favor by making mountains of applications. Consumers, in turn, buy into this rich application ecosystem. And so the virtuous circle feeds itself.
Or will, unless Google can intervene. Google isn't reported to be building a tablet. At least, not yet.
But that's largely because Google's strategy is to allow its hardware partners to build Android-based devices like tablets, Netbooks, smartphones, etc. CES was filled with them.
The strategy seems to be working, with IDC projecting Android to grow by a 150.4-percent compound annual growth rate through 2013, reaching 68 million units shipped that year.
Importantly, Google's strategy is very different from Apple's. Apple has set up an excellent, but very closed, developer sandbox where Apple retains complete control. Google's strategy depends heavily on open source, giving developers freedom, flexibility, and a paycheck at the end of the process.
Apple, however, could spoil this strategy. As Gartner's Brian Prentice reasons, Apple may be changing the rules of developer engagement just as Google starts to close the gap:
Rather than focus strictly on the addressable market for developers what about the addressable market of developers....
[H]earkening back to the 80s again, what if Apple, either today or some point in the future, is able to resurface HyperCard. Not 1980's HyperCard. But a new millennium iteration of it.
Doing so would massively increase the number of people that can create mobile applications and, by extension, create a new market for the more traditional developers to create widgets and components for this new class of developer - all available at the iTunes Store.
If Apple can pull something like this off [then] there is the potential for them to bind an enormous new army of next-generation consumer-developers to their proprietary platform. And that would be an outcome advocates of open source should ponder over long and hard.
In other words, what if Apple moves the goalposts? Apple could pull a Microsoft, making development much easier, while keeping the resulting applications safely entrenched in iTunes/the App Store.
Apple's advantage with the tablet is that developers already know how to write iPhone applications. It could be that writing specialized applications for the tablet won't be worth the bother, but it's likely that Apple learned enough with its iPhone experience to ensure developers will get on board the tablet train, too.
All of which could spoil Google's developer party, and end up crimping Android's growth just as it was set to explode. How will Google respond? How would you?
Information doesn't want to be free. It wants to be managed.
We live in the midst of a digital cornucopia that our brains simply cannot manage without help. Whether it's our 150 Facebook-friend limit or our ability to find and store iTunes songs, we need help processing the sheer abundance of digital goods.
Yes, we *will* pay...sometimes
Sure, most of us will take something for free if we can. Just ask the music industry, which has been battered by peer-to-peer piracy.
But not all of us. And not all of the time. I may think my news should be free while being perfectly happy to pay for my music downloads. Each person has priorities that define which content to buy and which content to download for free.
Nick Carr recognizes this in analyzing The New York Times' attempts to convince some people, some of the time, to pay for news content. While some mock The Times' strategy, suggesting that with a few clicks it's easy to circumvent the need to ever pay, Carr points out the foolishness of this view:
It assumes that everyone wants to bop around on the web all day trolling different sources for stories. It also assumes everyone is a scheming hacker who, to avoid having to fork out a few bucks, will click links in the Times twitter feed or otherwise figure out some geeky way to get around the system.
But not everyone's like that. In fact, most people aren't like that. Some people just want to go to a few trusted outlets for most of their news--sources rather than links define their news-gathering behavior--and some subset of that group will likely be willing to pay something for the convenience of having free run of a trusted site. (The iTunes store has revealed that a substantial set of people will happily pay money for digital music files that they could fairly easily scrounge up for free elsewhere on the web.)
Bingo. Convenience still pays. It's why people pay for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription when they can get the same bits from CentOS--or effectively the same bits from Canonical (Ubuntu) or Novell (Suse). It's why I buy "Jane Eyre" on my Kindle instead of just downloading a free version.
And it's why O'Reilly Media can dump DRM for its e-books and still see sales rise 104 percent, according to BoingBoing.
It turns out that we happily pay money to save time, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos might say. Super-abundance digital content is great, but it just takes too much time.
Businesses like Google, Apple, etc. give us a reprieve--a reprieve for which we'll pay.
Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady suggests the future of digital content businesses is data. Give away the content and monetize the data that results from tracking your customers' behavior with it.
Maybe. This model certainly pays nice dividends for Google with its advertising model.
But just as often we'll see business models based on convenience-enhancing filters. We simply can't process all the abundance that digitization offers, and we'll happily pay someone to pare it down for us and make our music, software, and movies manageable.
Despite booming enterprise server sales, some in the industry continue to grumble that Linux is too hard. Designed by geeks for geeks, the theory goes, Linux will never be mainstream.
Reality hasn't been kind to such arguments.
Consider the fact that Linux-based Google Android saw 350 percent growth in 2009, according to Myxer data. I've yet to hear anyone talking about Android being hard to use. My teenage neighbors bought their Android phones and have had little trouble texting, browsing the Web, and installing applications.
It's Linux. It's not hard.
Where Linux does sometimes fall down has little to do with Linux, and everything to do with the focus application developers place on Linux.
Some report having trouble installing applications on Linux, like the cutting-edge Firefox release. While some Linux defenders suggest that an easy way around this is simply to wait until official support/packaging arrives within Ubuntu/SUSE/Fedora/etc., that won't do for those of us who sometimes want to veer off-piste and use beta software.
Application developers make sure their beta software installs easily on Windows and Mac OS X. They don't pay as much attention to Linux.
The same is true for hardware vendors. Linux works very well when pre-installed on Dell hardware: just as well as Windows does. The difficulty is in getting the hardware vendors to pre-install Linux with all necessary drivers.
This, however, is an opportunity for the Linux distributions. The distribution with the best application and hardware support will win.
Red Hat demonstrated this in the enterprise server market, and is approaching $1 billion in revenues for its trouble. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is taking the initiative to determine for which third-party applications the Linux community wants easy installation.
Google, of course, has already done this with its Android platform. No Android user is ever going to have to learn about "sudo" or "apt-get install" or any other elements of the Linux command line.
That's how it should be. At least, for the mainstream.
Google also promises to be good for "the Linux desktop" by removing the need to worry about the operating system at all, instead focusing on Web applications. I've already had a taste of that this past week as I've been installing Ubuntu Linux on different hardware, running a range of Web applications as easily as I do on Mac OS X.
We're rapidly approaching this future when the OS takes a backseat to the applications that run on it. It's going to be an awesome time for consumers, as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and others duke it out for supremacy on the proliferating range of hardware devices that consumers and enterprises use: desktops, laptops, smartbooks, Netbooks, phones, etc.
Linux has a starring role to play in such a future. The company that makes Linux easiest will win.
If there was ever a doubt as to whether open-source software could be big business, Google has eradicated it. The Silicon Valley giant shovels open-source software out the door like Santa Claus, all the while monetizing it with cloud-based services.
Google' strategy is no longer in question. What does remain a question is why more companies aren't following its lead.
Gartner analyst Brian Prentice argues:
By 2020 open source will be so conceptually and practically integrated into the way business is done that the concept of blogging on open source in 2030 will be about as interesting as predicting the future of double-entry bookkeeping.
But we're not there yet. We're still stuck in Open Source Business 1.0.
News flash! Big money discovered in open-source software.
Think of the most broadly adopted open-source projects: Linux, MySQL, JBoss, Drupal, Joomla, etc. There should be scads of companies set up around these, not providing support for these specific technologies, but rather building cloud-based services that tie into them.
The money is not in the client. It's in the cloud.
And yet most "open-source businesses" continue to plod through old models of support and/or proprietary extensions. Why? Even Red Hat, the godfather of open-source businesses, has demonstrated that there's far more opportunity in cloud-based services (e.g., Red Hat Network) than simple support offerings.
It's a theme that Index Ventures' Bernard Dalle elucidated here, but too few appear to be getting the message.
Some get it. Look at Acquia. The company is building out a network of services to complement Drupal deployments. Sure, Acquia also offers support for Drupal, but that's small change in the grand scheme of things. The big money is in cloud services tied to broadly adopted open-source software.
It's a game that even Microsoft could play, if it chose to do so. Open source, in this model, is the most pragmatic, capitalist instinct an entrepreneur can have because ubiquity generates substantial commercialization opportunities.
Once a company gets to Google-esque size, it may not even matter that its particular open-source strategy falls short because, at a certain scale, Google-like services become much bigger than any one open-source project.
As an example, even if Google's open-source mobile software strategy fails, in the sense that the market doesn't broadly adopt Android, etc., Google still likely wins. As the Design by Gravity blog puts it, "Google is intent in raising the average in areas it thinks are key to its future."
In other words, Google may not care whether Android dominates the mobile market, but it does care that the state of the art in mobile advances so that it can benefit from those advances.
That's the end game: cloud-based services that become far too important to restrict to one particular open-source project. Getting there, however, can begin with fanning the flames of popularity and adoption of just one open-source project.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
