Microsoft dominates enterprise IT and likely will for a long time. But the software giant is struggling to match the nimble pace of open source on the Web, a pace being set by Google and others.
As but one example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer lost market share to Mozilla Firefox in September. To compete effectively on the Web, Microsoft will have no choice but fight open-source fire with fire.
This isn't about a need to appease the proverbial "community." It's about broad-based development, low-cost distribution, and, frankly, revitalizing its brand with developers.
Google gets this. While Google has long embraced open source like Linux and MySQL to give it flexible, low-cost technology with which to scale out its operations, the company has dramatically increased its open-source developer outreach in the past two years. And while some companies dribble out open source at the edge of their operations, Google is releasing core software like Wave and Android for open-source communities to help develop and shape.
The result? A loud and loyal following. Google may not get much in the way of quality external contributions from these efforts (It's still too early to tell.) But the strategy is already paying for itself in terms of marketing, if nothing else.
Hence, while Microsoft's mobile software has stalled for years and recently dropped to 4 percent, according to CNET's report on recent AdMob data, Google Android jumped from 2 percent to 7 percent in just six months.
That's the power of community.
It's a community that Microsoft arguably has in the enterprise, but which it emphatically lacks on the Web. Facebook-style developers simply don't think of coding in Microsoft's .Net. They write LAMP applications. To match this, Microsoft is going to need to join the open-source party.
Microsoft is slowly getting the message. For example, the company has been optimizing Web technology like open-source PHP to run well on Windows. More interestingly, Microsoft's experimental Barrelfish multicore operating system has been released under a highly permissive BSD-style open-source license.
The use of a BSD-style license suggests Microsoft is serious about adoption of the project, and of generating trust with developers. Developers can take BSD-style code and do pretty much whatever they want with it, with no permission required and no oversight exercised by Microsoft. It's a great move.
Microsoft needs more of this.
The company recently saw its open-source chief leave Redmond for a Silicon Valley cloud start-up. Such movement, from Microsoft to cloud/Web-based computing, is well under way and something that Microsoft can only halt if it starts to play the same game as its competitors.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to think the key to competition is features (in IE8 and elsewhere). It's not. That's just a start.
The key is encouraging and harnessing the power of community. Microsoft, which has done this so effectively in the enterprise, needs to learn to do this on the Web, too, which is tantamount to saying that Microsoft must fully embrace open-source development.
No, it needn't release all of its software as open source. Google certainly doesn't and, until recently, neither did the open-source bellwether, Red Hat.
But Microsoft needs to be doing much more to embrace, without extinguishing, open source. Open source is the key to making money on the Web, and last time I checked, Microsoft still liked money.
Google blew the minds of developers with the introduction of its innovative Google Wave, a new approach to real-time content collaboration, but its odds of breezing into enterprise computing anytime soon remain remote.
Within enterprise IT departments, starved for compelling ways to collaborate on application development, however, Google Wave may find a ready audience.
Enterprise computing remains in the Stone Age, by modern standards, a topic nicely addressed by the Financial Times recently. While the consumer Internet offers diverse ways to connect (via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and other services), the enterprise remains somewhat buttoned-down, relegated to Microsoft Exchange and the occasional fling with IBM's Lotus.
Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.
This isn't necessarily Microsoft's or IBM's fault, of course. Both offer other products that push the envelope on enterprise computing. But it's hard for enterprises to easily digest rapid-fire innovation, and it's not exactly easy for software vendors to recoup investments in groundbreaking innovations, either, as RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady noted in his review of Google Wave:
We don't see a lot of dramatic leaps forward in software, I'd argue, both because it's exceedingly difficult to develop and launch revolutionary products, and because the economics act against it.
It's difficult, of course, to produce them: how many vendors can afford the indulgence of turning high-quality resources loose on a multiyear project with no clear revenue plan in place? But it can be even more difficult to market (or sell such revolutionary products) because, well, they're not what people are used to, and they take some explaining.
So, given that Google Wave may have moved much further than most enterprises are able to willing to accept, at least for now, what good is it?
Equitas IT Solutions' Ryan Cartwright suggests an answer. He indicates that Wave offers "the chance to...make a big improvement in the way we develop free software."
He's absolutely right, but why stop there?
Most of the world's software is not written by open-source software developers, nor is it written by Microsoft or other traditional software vendors. It's written by enterprises for internal use. As such, if Google Wave has the potential to facilitate software development by facilitating real-time collaboration on code--and it does--then why not unleash its potential within enterprise application development?
Google Wave may well crash on the shore of enterprise adoption, but I suspect that it may well roll into the enterprise, anyway, as a code collaboration tool deployed by enterprise IT for its own use. Eventually, that "personal" consumption should trickle out to business users clamoring for their enterprise-computing experience to catch up with their consumer-computing world.
This could be Google's game to lose.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I thought of just Tweeting a few of these news bits, but some deserve to be blogged. Alas! I lack the time today but....
- Joomla has surpassed 10,000,000 downloads. It's hard to describe just how impressive this is, and particularly given the fact that these have come in the past four years, and after a fractious fork from Mambo.
- The University of Southern Mississippi and the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate have launched the Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program, along with Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and the U.S. Navy, to invest $1.5 million in the development of open-source technology.
- A new report from Gartner suggests 42 percent of CIOs surveyed chopped their IT budgets in the first quarter of the year. Less budget almost certainly will mean more open source.
- MindTouch (Disclosure: I am an advisor to MindTouch) CEO Aaron Fulkerson asks what's the big deal with Google's new Wave collaborative platform, given that wiki technology (like MindTouch's Dekiwiki) has been "waving" for years. Rafael Laguna, Open-XChange CEO, agrees. I still think Wave is cool.
- Speaking of Google, the company recently launched Page Speed, an open-source Firefox add-on that "web developers can use...to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. Google continues to demonstrate ever-stronger commitment to feeding the open-source community.
- Given that no one has yet settled on the optimal open-source code contribution model, MySQL developer Brian Aker discusses the Drizzle fork of MySQL and how he and the project team is handling third-party contributions to it. Very interesting insight into code contribution policies, copyright assignment, etc.
- Acer, meanwhile, is crippling its Android Netbooks by having them dual-boot Windows. I don't have anything against Windows (well, that's not really true...), but this seems like an exercise in futility. If customers want Windows, give it to them. If they want the lower price (and different experience) of Linux, give that to them. But don't give them both, or they'll likely revert to Windows out of sheer habit.
- Cloudera CEO Mike Olson indicates that Web applications are just the beginning for Hadoop. Indeed, Cloudera's easier-to-use commercial version of Hadoop is doing so well that Cloudera had to raise another $6 million just to keep up. Fortune, for one, thinks that Hadoop might be perfect to help power the electrical power grid.
- Back in Redmond, Microsoft is coming under increased pressure from the European Commission, reports The Register, which may force Microsoft to offer rival browsers with Windows. Microsoft probably feels pretty beleaguered, but Roy Schestowitz offers up some data that indicates it's spending its free time pressuring European groups to side with it. It doesn't seem to be working.
- Finally, Oracle executives didn't mince words in a town hall meeting with Sun employees, stipulating that some tough choices will be made about Sun technology and personnel. Indeed.
Watching the Google Wave demo last week and reading Tim O'Reilly's enthusiastic review, it struck me how amazingly cool Wave promises to be...and just how paltry most enterprise software remains.
Sure, you think: it's easy for Google to innovate. It has thousands of engineers!
Maybe. But I don't remember Microsoft coming up with Wave, and it has even more engineers. Neither did IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc.
Google did, and it started Wave with a small core team of two brothers, a core team that appears to have done much of the work gestating Wave to its currently demo-able state.
There's a very good reason that Google innovated Wave, and not, for example, IBM. Google has no incumbent enterprise products to which it must pay obeisance. Google doesn't even have a built-in background with the desktop that moors its vision of what is possible. Google, in other words, is creating an "innovator's dilemma" for the incumbent enterprise software vendors, entrapped by their own successful products and the need to appease employees and existing customers.
Google, in effect, starts from a tabula rasa, one heavily influenced by the Web and all that the Web can do. And so Google Wave is born, while Microsoft continues to churn out tired retreads of Exchange/Outlook, IBM gives us Lotus version 10,001, and Oracle works furiously to tie its collaboration products into its existing suite of heavy, "enterprise" software.
More depressingly, the start-up world of enterprise-software companies largely tries to mimic these old paradigms of what enterprise software means. Some do very well, but few break the mold and start again on what computing means, as Google has done with Wave.
The best the incumbents can hope for is that customers will buy heavily into Wave, and will come to expect Wave-like innovation from their existing vendors. This will likely require external acquisitions rather than internal development, and will also mean that executive management at the big software vendors don't allow internal politics to squeeze the life out of the products of incoming acquisitions.
In sum, Google Wave is much bigger than Google. It's a chance to show the enterprise software industry how to innovate again. (Hint: some of the best Wave innovation is yet to come, as significant parts of Wave will be released as open-source code to encourage add-ons, extensions, and other derivative works.)
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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