The Open Road

Linux has been growing in importance for years in the darkened server closets. In the server world, Linux's cost and performance benefits have trumped its early weaknesses (Ease of use, etc.), making Linux the heir apparent to the Unix throne.

But that's the server, where geeks write software for other geeks. In the consumer world of personal computers and mobile devices, however, Linux hasn't fared particularly well precisely because the developers of Linux differ so markedly from the vast majority of the user population.

Linux developers, in other words, scratch very different "itches" from those plaguing most would-be Linux users.

It seems clear to me that, as Bill Weinberg astutely argues, the way forward for Linux is not in replicating Microsoft's desktop dominance, but rather in forging a new, consumer-friendly mobile Linux experience, one focused on the youth that are growing up mobile.

This "way" is being paved by Intel, Canonical, Novell, and other companies that have significant experience writing software for normal users, and not merely the alpha geeks of Linux. I've spent the past two weeks fiddling with different variants of Linux-based Netbooks, in particular the Linux Foundation's Moblin Beta 2 (Developed by Intel and Novell) and Canonical's Ubuntu 9.04 Remix for Netbooks, and I believe they are onto something.

The first thing that struck me when using Moblin is how it breaks new ground in defining a new personal computer experience, one designed for the narrow (hardware) confines of a Netbook but offering a limitless portal to social networking and a broad Web experience beyond.

This is perhaps why Acer has committed to Moblin in a big way, and why Canonical is joining up with Moblin, as are others.

As for Ubuntu, it's an even tighter user experience (though, to be fair to Moblin, it's still in beta and so many of its rough edges will be smoothed over by general release, I assume). This isn't surprising given Ubuntu's singular focus on usability. It doesn't require any specialized knowledge of Linux though it does give the user too much information on what's happening under the hood. The lay user simply doesn't care. We just want it to work.

The experience hasn't been without its difficulties. My experience with Ubuntu, for example, was plagued by constant nagging to install yet another package to be able to play proprietary codecs. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols suggests that this problem is going away, but it can't leave fast enough. It's asking way too much to expect consumers to have to work in order to watch a YouTube video.

We are users, after all, not developers.

Slowly but surely, however, vendors are getting the Linux experience "right" for Netbooks and other mobile devices. I've been leaving my Intel-loaned Acer Aspire One Netbook around where my kids, ages four through 12, will open it up and experiment. Each one has quickly managed to find the games in Moblin and Ubuntu, and my older children were quickly browsing the Web and even typing up school reports. In minutes. With no coaching.

To me, this suggests the path forward for Linux is in new, as yet underdeveloped markets like mobile, and for an as yet under-monopolized audience: youth. My kids have grown up with Macs, but they're hardly grown up yet. Their experience with computers has been as much about mobile phones as laptops.

They are the most mobile-inclined generation the world has yet seen, making them an ideal target for new Linux-based mobile devices. As the Bible notes in Proverbs 22:6:

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Children's conceptions of what a computer must look like and feel like have yet to calcify into a Windows mold. They are the audience to win for those vendors interested in dominating the next decade of personal computing.

Old dogs strain to learn new tricks, making the Microsoft-conceived desktop a poor target for Linux vendors. The market is mobile. The market is children.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It's perhaps no secret that the enterprise sales model is broken. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and open source have picked the lock on the enterprise, enabling CIOs to try before they buy, disrupting the old model of paying far too much for demoware and roadmap dreams.

It's a welcome shift of risk from the buyer to the vendor, as Geva Perry highlights:

We're now witnessing an increasing trend of bottom-up sales. A casual decision made by developers on a day-to-day basis, not a grand strategy laid out by the CIO. Try-and-buy is the norm, and so are subscription payments and other models that take off the financial burden from the customer and places it on the vendor.

But it's not only a matter of a shift to subscriptions, as CMS Watch's Kas Thomas details: CIOs want pricing greatly simplified:

These days, buyers of enterprise software are looking for simplicity -- simplicity in licensing, simplicity in accounting, simple APIs, uncomplicated UIs. If IT experts have learned anything in the past five years (years that have seen fast/simple technologies like Ruby on Rails, REST, and AJAX overturn a lot of apple carts), it's that complexity is costly. And in the current economic environment, there's no room for excess costs.

Open source provides that simplicity. It enables enterprises to pay for only the value they need, something which Red Hat has been highlighting lately. SaaS also provides this simplicity, though it leaves out the customer freedom that open source affords.

In either case, however, they demonstrate where software sales are going: smaller, incremental deals rather than big upfront commitments based on little more than slides and vague promises.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

As the former COO at Delta Air Lines during its bankruptcy proceedings, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst knows something about making tough choices in the executive chair. His voice is worth hearing as we continue to swim through one of the worst economic economic crises in the history of the United States.

In an interview with the E-Commerce Times, Whitehurst outlines a few of his guiding management principles, but one struck me as particularly useful in understanding where Red Hat's product strategy could be going:

The key to steering a company past difficult obstacles is to focus on a few initiatives. "A key lesson, that I think is really important and really hard for business leaders to do, is to prioritize and pick two or three things and knock the cover off the ball. You see it over and over and over again where companies try to do too much."

I read this to suggest that it's unlikely Red Hat is going to be straying too far from its infrastructure roots in the near term. While the company has been experimenting with various programs for engaging the open-source ISV community like RHX, it's unlikely that Red Hat itself will be entering the application fray in earnest anytime soon. With JBoss significantly outpacing RHEL sales, perhaps this will change, but not during the downturn.

For the foreseeable future, watch for Red Hat to double down on its existing investments and, once those carry it through this recession, turn up the heat on its competition by aggressively moving beyond core infrastructure offerings.

Yahoo has been looking for ways to differentiate itself from Google and online rivals like Facebook and MySpace. Until now, it has largely been reactive, losing search market share to Google, as well as community market share to Facebook and others.

Recently, however, Yahoo has settled on an approach that just might give it a fighting chance. The strategy involves opening up the Yahoo platform: open source, open APIs, open borders, and stringent privacy protection. CNET News' Stephen Shankland writes:

The Yahoo Open Strategy theoretically could help Yahoo not just keep up with the Joneses, but leapfrog them. Although Yahoo capitalized on the first generation of online social activity, e-mail, and instant messaging, it lagged rivals such as Facebook when it comes to letting people build online communities of friends and business contacts. Yahoo's new strategy, though, is tuned to its own assets.

Google has a powerful search engine, but its online community is nascent, compared to Yahoo's. Facebook and MySpace have got social ties, but not Yahoo's breadth of finance, sports, entertainment, news, and communications. Yahoo Open Strategy is a recipe not easily reproduced in full by Yahoo competitors.

What does "open" look like at Yahoo? You can check out to get a sense, but the reality is that screenshots don't really tell the full story on Yahoo Open Strategy because they show only Yahoo properties.

Therein lies the problem.

Yahoo Open Strategy, for all the ways it enables third-party services to find their way in, sounds just as closed as ever, when it comes to letting Yahoo services out. Yes, I know that part of the strategy is also about letting Yahoo services and data be consumed beyond Yahoo.com, but note the semantics in Yahoo's description of the strategy:

Based on our new universal-profile service, we let you see your connections' activity updates across Yahoo, such as the stories they've buzzed, the hotels they've reviewed on Yahoo Travel, or shows they've rated on Yahoo TV. In the future, those updates will come from things people are doing across the Web outside of Yahoo.

People today are communicating and connecting with others in various ways, from e-mail, to blogs, to real-time messages. The Updates feature brings these Web activities together in one place to allow you to stay up-to-speed on a range of your connections' activities and interests.

See what I mean? It's largely a one-way openness. Yes, Yahoo suggests that its applications and associated data may find their way into Google or Facebook, for example, but that's not what Yahoo Open Strategy really seems to be about.

Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo's Audience Product Division, says the strategy is "changing Yahoo from a walled garden to the best of the Web," but the emphasis is heavily on bringing that Web inside of Yahoo, not pushing Yahoo services beyond the walls of Yahoo.com.

This may simply be a matter of semantics, but given Yahoo's second-place standing on the Web, I think its Open Strategy should have first focused on letting its services roam, rather than on corralling others' services to run within its walls. The reality is that Yahoo as a destination has been losing its appeal to end users.

Yahoo Open Strategy, then, to be most effective, should first focus on hooking users on its services, without hooking them on Yahoo. By emphasizing Yahoo first (plus third-party services within that domain), rather than third-party services first (with Yahoo services within those domains), Yahoo may not have done much to slow its slide.

I really liked this Ina Fried interview with Microsoft's new CIO, Tony Scott. It gives good insight into how Microsoft "eats its own dogfood," and how it can improve in understanding customer requirements.

On this last item, Scott's commentary was intriguing:

What I am trying to do is improve our world in all three areas. On the dogfood side, I think this is where maybe I bring some value as an outsider. I've been going to Microsoft for years...What I was always disappointed in was the relative degree to which Microsoft could talk to us as external CIOs about what the upgrade experience was like....

Microsoft used a very different process than what customers would use. We never historically went from production bits to production bits in terms of the upgrade process. We went through a series of betas.

One of the changes I am trying to bring is...we are going to take some segments of the company and use them to experience what customers experience and go through the normal upgrade process. I think by doing that we can be more relevant to the ultimate consumers of Microsoft's products.

This is a great move on Microsoft's part, and a testament to the innovative role a CIO can have, particularly at a software vendor.

Now Microsoft's customer base just needs the company to also experiment with seriously mixed environments: open source, proprietary, and different blends of proprietary software. Scott acknowledges in the interview that Microsoft "predominately" uses its own software internally. This is appropriate, but it would be useful for Microsoft to see how the other half lives, as well.

By the way, I'm very interested in having a fishbowl debate at OSBC in 2009, involving the CIOs of Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft. I've been trying to reach Ben Fried at Google, with no luck. Can anyone help gather these people? It would be fascinating to have them talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of their respective approaches in front of a live CIO audience.

There's more than a whiff of truth to The VAR Guy's suggestion that Google's Android antics make it seem like the Microsoft of yore: heavy on marketing and light on substance. In particular, I'm equally dismayed by Google's "vaporware" announcements:

Throughout the 1990s and even today, Microsoft often pre-announces products to engage and excite ISVs (independent software vendors). Win the ISV battle, and you'll win the resulting product wars. It's a smart strategy, and Google adopted it when the company announced the path to Android. (Check out this preview video of Android devices.) But the strategy also has some downside: ISVs get early access to developer tools, but their work on an "emerging" platform often distracts them away from existing platforms and immediate business opportunities.

"Downside" for competitors, that is. This strategy is very tempting: you want the market to slow down and wait for you as a vendor, but few vendors have the brand impact to be able to command the market to do so. Microsoft does, and Google does. But the harm to real vendors that actually deliver substance is significant.

Google has always undercut this vaporware tendency with its "perpetual beta" product release strategy. This allows it to ship product without shipping "product." "Oh, it doesn't work? Well, it's just a beta!" Clever, and thus far effective, as Google's betas often outclass established products from other vendors.

Android, however, is different. It has underwhelmed, but has sucked up a lot of marketing oxygen. Let's hope this is an anomaly and not the beginning of a trend from Google.

For the U.S. federal government, it's no longer a question of "if" when it comes to open source, a Federal Computer Week article notes, but "how much" and "which projects."

Government officials who support open source now find they have a new decision to make: whether to use one of the growing number of open-source packages that could handle higher-profile agency operations, such as business intelligence analysis, content management or customer relationship management (CRM), to name a few.

I know from personal experience that there are very few federal organizations that are not already using open-source applications or are evaluating them. Recent survey data suggests that at least 55 percent of U.S. federal agencies are using open source now. I suspect the number is actually much higher. The genie is out of the bottle.

The reason is clear. As the article states, the two primary drivers of open-source adoption are "lower upfront cost and a greater ability to customize." More flexibility. Less cost. It's a perfect combination.

With SAP and Oracle raising prices in an effort to test the limits of price elasticity, CIOs are devoting an ever increasing share of their IT budgets to feeding bloated technology vendors. As CIO.com's Bernard Golden suggests, however, such devotion to the old guard of IT is making it easier and easier for disruptive SaaS and open-source vendors to "ooze" into the enterprise:

...[J]ust because most of your budget is tied up feeding legacy vendors doesn't mean that the rest of your company isn't going to pursue new IT-enabled offerings, it just means they're not going to look to you to deliver them. You're the folks stuck in the big vendor hairball. The other parts of the company will find money to do new things; it just won't go into your budget.

You can hope that the big vendors will deliver products and functionality to get you out of the box, but that won't solve the problem [as it forces the enterprise to accept the vendor's priorities and walk in lock-step with its other customers]....While IT is apparently willing to live with big vendor decisions, the rest of the company can't afford to, because it threatens their ability to compete....A stability-focused, risk-averse stance based upon big vendor dependence forces non-IT organizations to look elsewhere for innovation.

As the Bank of New York told me, open source is the new innovation platform. More enterprises look to open source to provide cutting-edge IT solutions. They also look to SaaS because they can afford to skirt the CIO's pet vendors to get things done, as Asurion's R0ml Lefkowitz suggested at OSBC last year.

The big vendors are forcing enterprises to look elsewhere for solutions through high prices, high lock-in, and high complexity. Thank you!

CIO.com addresses the souring economy with this counsel for CIOs:

When IT directors take the time to build a business case demonstrating the ROI for these kinds of projects [training, etc.], they tend to get funded. Businesses aren't really interested in cutting costs for the sake of doing it, they just want to eliminate waste and get the most from every dollar spent on IT services. It falls to the CIO to demonstrate the value of IT initiatives to the business in real economic terms, and to counter the image of IT as a cost center.

Given that the CIO is generally the last person to know about the rising tide of open source within her walls, perhaps the savvy CIO should get out of her corner office a bit more and talk to her architects and developers more in this recessionary period to find out what open-source initiatives are going on, and which should be fed (or killed). I suspect there's a heck of a lot of efficiency gains to be had by dumping BEA for JBoss, Oracle for MySQL, etc.

In a bull market, it's easy to overspend on technology that you don't really need, and which never realizes its potential (or perhaps does, and there's the problem...). In a downward cycle, it's a good time to make some calculated bets. Open source should be one of them.