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.
Mozilla's Firefox has maintained its steady ascent against Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the global browser market, hitting 22.98 percent vs. IE's 66.97 percent.
However, Sony has now given Google's Chrome browser something that Mozilla has struggled to obtain: a preinstall deal. As CNET reports, Google Chrome is being installed on Windows PCs alongside IE, with other distribution deals likely.
Finally, a clear choice for consumers.
Google Chrome still accounts for less than 3 percent of the global browser market, but it has something that even Firefox can't match: a dominant, global consumer brand. Google Chrome isn't interesting to Sony because of its market share in Web browsers, but rather because of its overall consumer brand coupled with steady innovation in browsers.
Intriguingly, this Chrome deal opens up the possibility that Sony, as well as other computer manufacturers, will eventually sign on to ship Google Chrome OS, Google's Netbook-optimized Linux operating system.
At the same time, this move may open the door for Mozilla to snag its own preinstall deal(s) with competitors to Sony, who will also likely want to buy into Google's brand but may prefer the Firefox option, given its wider adoption. Firefox users have been pressuring major hardware vendors to preinstall Firefox for years, but the best Mozilla has done is to get Firefox preinstalled with Linux-based notebooks and Netbooks.
That's hardly something to cheer about, given the small share of Linux in mobile personal computers.
This Google Chrome preinstall leaves an opening for Mozilla, but to capitalize on it Mozilla must improve its message. It has recently been claiming that we're hitting a "seat-belt moment" in which browser security could lead to consumers flocking to Firefox. But it's hard to get excited about browser security, no matter how important it is.
Much more interesting are Mozilla's plans to update its browser to 4.0 by the end of 2010 and to release Fennec, its mobile browser, before the end of 2009, according to TG Daily. Extending Firefox to my mobile device? That is something consumers can get excited about which, in turn, should stir up interest from hardware vendors that are looking to bridge their smartphone and laptop strategies.
Back to Sony. Its open-source credentials have been called into question due to its rootkit debacle and decision to restrict Linux on the PlayStation 3, but this new decision to preinstall Chrome should redeem it with the open-source community and give Sony a ready-made marketing machine.
The browser market, already competitive, just became even more so. Google is at the top of its game right now, but so is Mozilla. Microsoft, for its part, is reportedly holding meetings in D.C. that some Beltway insiders have dubbed as "screw Google" gatherings. But Microsoft probably should be spending more time developing innovative browser solutions to compete with Google and Mozilla.
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Net Applications has finally published its browser market share numbers for July, and the results are surprising. Given European summer holidays and Mozilla Firefox's large user base in Europe (35 percent market share), Firefox should be seeing a significant decline in market share through the summer months.
But it isn't.
Instead, as detailed below, Firefox market share continues to hold steady at 22.47 percent, while Internet Explorer also treads water at 67.68 percent. Only Safari (4.07 percent) and Google Chrome (2.59 percent) show appreciable, sustained growth over the past few months.
Browser Market Share Data, July 2009
(Credit: Net Applications)With Firefox recently surpassing its one-billionth download, we should see rising market share in the fall, unless back-to-school PC sales give IE a bump.
But I don't think IE will win over the student crowd, which is more likely to be a Mac (Safari) crowd than a Microsoft one. And so I suspect we'll continue to see Firefox (along with Safari and Chrome) rising against IE.
After all, eventually even the Griswalds come home and get back to work. When they do, more and more will be using Firefox.
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Microsoft may be its own toughest competitor. As noted by Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 8 browser is taking the browser market by storm...so long as you define "browser market" as "Internet Explorer 7." Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 browser, at 30 million downloads and counting, isn't being affected by IE 8's uptake. But then, neither is IE 6.
It's only IE 7 that is getting squeezed by IE 8. And you thought they were friends...
Here's the data on IE market share:
(Credit:
Asa Dotzler (Data from Net Applications))
This suggests that Firefox, with roughly 22 percent of browser market share, is the second-most widely used browser on the planet. Not bad when you consider the previous state of affairs when Firefox 1.0 was launched, as Dotzler does:
Back then IE 6 was the most popular browser with almost 85% of Web usage followed by older IE versions accounting for another 10 points of share, and with all other vendors' browsers accounting for only 5% of usage.
In other words, we have real competition again, competition that sees an open-source upstart seriously challenge Microsoft for first place in browser usage. Mozilla has accomplished this by making Firefox easy to use, easy to contribute to (which keeps getting easier, as Glyn Moody reports), and powerful through a large and growing community.
Importantly, Mozilla has had to fight for every user. Unlike IE, Firefox isn't pre-installed with Windows. That "30 million" number I cited above? That's not even due to an auto-update feature, which Mozilla has yet to turn on. Once that happens, Firefox 3.5's impressive download numbers should soar.
Perhaps Microsoft should stop competing with itself and start competing with Firefox...?
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Despite the rise of open source within the federal government, Mozilla's Firefox has yet to gain an official nod from the Department of State, at least according to a recent question-and-answer session that Secretary Hillary Clinton and Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy hosted last week, with an ironic back-and-forth on Firefox kicked off by government employee Jim Finkle:
Finkle: Can you please let the staff use an alternative Web browser called Firefox? I just--(applause)--I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn't use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don't understand why State can't use it. It's a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)
Clinton: Well, apparently, there's a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don't know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)
Kennedy: The answer is, at the moment, it's an expense question. We can --
Finkle: It's free. (Laughter.)
Kennedy: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It's a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we're looking at. And thanks to the secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that's pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the secretary's continuing pushing, we're hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.
Yes, you're correct; it's free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you're running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the secretary rightly said, out fobs and other devices, you're caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can't do everything at once.
Under Secretary Kennedy makes a good point: deploying Firefox isn't free, in terms of administration. But then, nothing is, including Internet Explorer. The real question is whether Firefox is easier and more cost-effective to support than IE. Mozilla has made some recent moves to make it such. We'll see if the government is listening.
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As I type this, Firefox 3.5 is blazing past 5.6 million downloads, having been released just a day and a half ago. While such uptake for Mozilla's upgraded browser is impressive, the bigger story is how Firefox 3.5 is upgrading the Web with its extensive support for HTML 5. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has brought the company's browser back into the 21st century, but its sluggish (and perhaps perverse) response to emerging Web standards threatens to leave it in Web 1.0 Blunderland.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley wonders if the departure of Bill Gates has taken some of the bite out of Microsoft, and she may be on to something. Regardless, Microsoft needs to quickly execute to outflank Firefox or it threatens to let Mozilla, not Microsoft, define the Web, as Slate implies:
The best thing about the new Firefox is that it gives us a peek at the Internet of tomorrow...Firefox 3.5 offers the best implementation of the (HTML 5) standard--and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language. In other words, Firefox isn't just an upgrade for your computer; it could well prompt a re-engineering of the Web itself.
But it's not just HTML 5. Firefox is innovating in a number of other areas, including "location-aware browsing" on the "desktop," while Mozilla's Weave is experimenting with new ways to enrich identity in the browser. In tandem, Mozilla's team is also actively working on improving the online video experience.
And that's just this week.
It took Microsoft two-and-a-half years to move from IE7 to IE8, while five years passed before the company updated IE6 with IE7. The company seems to be moving faster on browser development now, but is it fast enough to keep up with Mozilla, not to mention Apple (Safari) and Google (Chrome)?
It won't be enough for Microsoft to borrow features from Mozilla's Firefox. Microsoft needs to innovate again, and not simply in its marketing department.
Also, it would be nice if IE were available for more than Windows. Mozilla is available on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and it doesn't seem to slow its development pace down. Perhaps Microsoft should stop trying to protect Windows at the expense of losing the Web?
Of course, Mozilla, too, faces a host of competitive issues, as CNET describes. But Mozilla has never been shy about innovating. It exists to improve the Web, and understands that a competitive browser market does that...even if Firefox sometimes has to play catch up.
For today, however, the field is Mozilla's to lose.
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Steve Ballmer needs to brush up on Roman history. Otherwise he seems doomed to repeat it, as two recent Microsoft campaigns suggest.
Microsoft has been dominant for so long that it has grown soft. As Edward Gibbon wrote in his exceptional "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," it is not outside enemies that crushed Rome so much as its own effete greatness:
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
Two new Microsoft directives suggest that the writing is on the wall for the once-great company. And this isn't even to mention Microsoft's tactics to squash Linux's growth in the Netbook market.
First, Microsoft has kicked off a "Get the Facts" browser campaign that is long on hyperbole and short on facts. Reading Microsoft's browser comparison chart, one would think that using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome is a fast track to leprosy: IE apparently dominates in security, privacy, ease of use, healing the sick, and causing the lame to walk.
Speaking of "lame," IBM's Savio Rodrigues warns us to not be fooled by comparison tables that dramatically favor one product over others. Internet Explorer has gotten better over the years (It only had one way to go), but Microsoft's claims aren't even credible when it skews the results so dramatically in its favor.
Mozilla's own marketing for Firefox is very, very different.
Not content to let false advertising do the trick, Microsoft has also resorted to paying people to use its browser and calling users "idiots" if they opted to try something else. As TechCrunch reports, Microsoft has backed down from the ad hominem attacks, but the company is starting to look desperate.
(In need of charity itself, Microsoft is contributing to charities for every download of IE8. Awww....)
As if this browser desperation weren't enough, Microsoft has kicked off a second initiative that reveals just how unloved its "innovation" has become. Microsoft has confirmed its 18-month Windows 7 to XP downgrade policy.
There are very good reasons for software vendors to prod customers into staying current with software releases, but it is amazing just how hard Microsoft has had to work to convince Windows customers to leave XP. Apple and Linux customers seem to upgrade to their latest and greatest operating systems, while Microsoft customers seem to be pining for the good ol' Windows days.
It's one thing to have an upgrade policy. Having to articulate a downgrade policy is a signal of Microsoft defeat, not victory.
Gibbon wrote that "instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long." I feel the same way about Microsoft. It has done so much for the software industry--some very negative, much very positive--but it seems to have lost the plot. It is telling when the company's best product in years is the XBox, a hardware platform, as Bob Rosenberg noted to me over email.
Microsoft is a victim of its own desktop success, a fact that Google is using against it. Unless Microsoft can break out of its downward spiral of negative advertising born of stifled innovation in its products, it will fall. Sort of like Rome. Because of immoderate greatness.
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Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to hemorrhage market share to Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser. But Microsoft is set to surpass Mozilla in one area: adoption of its open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), according to research from Black Duck Software.
The MS-PL is now used by 1.02 percent of open-source projects. This is impressive given that it was only approved by the Open Source Initiative some two years ago. The Mozilla Public License (MPL), by contrast, has been around for many more years and is used by 1.25 percent of open-source projects, ranking ninth in terms of popularity. MS-PL is 10th but is gaining fast.
It's a matter of coloring inside the CodePlex lines.
The MPL offers some benefits over its long-serving peers like the GNU General Public License (50.17 percent market share), but often the benefits are outweighed by the sheer momentum of the GPL. Whatever its deficiencies, the GPL is a relatively well-understood license.
For those developers looking to go "off-piste" with a different license, and particularly for those with a Microsoft inclination--as is the case with Microsoft open-source code hosting repository CodePlex--it's far easier to opt to do so with the MS-PL versus the MPL, the Eclipse Public License, or another license.
As CodePlex continues to gain in popularity, I expect we'll see the MS-PL push past MPL and potentially even past the MIT License, which currently ranks seventh at 3.79 percent share. When that happens, it will be a sign that Microsoft has truly arrived as an open-source player.
Of course, I suspect that Microsoft would rather beat Mozilla in browser market share than in license market share. But you can't have everything, now can you?
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Apple has been desperately trying to turn Safari into a mainstream browser player. Unfortunately, its numbers simply don't compare to Firefox.
Safari 4.0 notched 11 million downloads in just three days. While significant, this number is almost a rounding error compared with Firefox 3.0.11, which pulled down 150 million downloads in just 24 hours, as Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reports.
With more than 300 million active users of Firefox, Mozilla is miles ahead of Safari in terms of users. Firefox also dwarfs Safari (and Internet Explorer) in community; indeed, it is Firefox's rich ecosystem of add-ons and extensions that arguably render irrelevant any performance advantages Safari claims.
Perhaps for this reason, despite the apparent rise of Safari, Firefox is actually gaining at its expense, as Dotzler calls out:
Safari, just like IE, gets virtually all of its usage by shipping as the bundled and default browser with its operating system...
Safari usage is growing...the explanation, though, is not more people choosing Safari; it's more people choosing Mac. That's a very different thing. Having chosen Mac, Safari users, about 27% of them, have opted out of the bundled and default browser and instead chosen Firefox.
That's an even higher conversion to Firefox rate than we're seeing on Windows.
I'm an example of this. I was one of those 11 million Safari downloads, but I did so because the Apple update system pushed the update to me, not because I actually wanted it. (Nor am I alone in this.) I use Safari roughly twice per month: once when I check my bill on Comcast.com (which doesn't seem to work with Firefox), and once when I review Net Applications for browser market share (which, again, doesn't seem to work properly with Firefox).
Other than that, it's all Firefox, all the time.
I'm a Mac fanatic, but that doesn't mean I swallow Safari along with it. Safari lacks the add-ons that make my Firefox experience so rich. Safari may be fast, but it's like having a fast car without enough room to seat my family or accommodate a stereo and cup holder. I'm sure there's an audience for that, but I'm not it.
So, while Microsoft resorts to charitable donations to goose its IE8 downloads, and Apple claims misleading Safari numbers, Firefox wins because it's simply better.
Update @ 3:50 PT: It turns out that the Comcast.com problem stems from Adblock Plus, not Firefox. I guess I shouldn't blame Firefox for its extensions' problems.
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Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.
That's the message coming out of the European Commission as it grumbles about Microsoft's decision to strip Internet Explorer from OEM and retail versions of Windows 7 in Europe, as CNET reports.
The EU wants Microsoft to bundle a range of competing browsers with Windows 7. Microsoft, apparently in an act of defiance, said "Let them eat cake!" and is offering no browser at all.
Before you join the EU's protest, however, consider that this could well be Mozilla's best chance to increase its 31.1 percent market share in Europe.
Microsoft's Dave Heiner indicates that it will "offer (IE) separately and on an easy-to-install basis to both computer manufacturers and users." For such people, Firefox will be as hard (or easy) to get as before.
But what about those left without a browser? As Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, articulated to me, most people download Firefox...using IE, which means leaving them browser-less (even without IE) is tantamount to cutting off their access to Firefox.
I disagree.
Mozilla has done a masterful job of marketing itself. From Asa Dotzler's early Spread Firefox campaign to its campus representatives, Mozilla rightly earns kudos from Advertising Age:
Mozilla competes against Microsoft, Apple and Google -- arguably the biggest and most valuable brands in the world -- and it succeeds with no traditional advertising (or big budgets) to speak of.
How? It's the community, stupid. In a ground war--that is, in a war of foot soldiers and hand-to-hand combat--I think Mozilla would beat IE. When your neighbor in Colmar, France, complains about her lack of Internet access on her new PC, are you going to install Firefox or IE for her? I'm guessing that Mozilla's army of enthusiastic community volunteers would be over in seconds with a Firefox-laden USB stick.
In fact, I can see the Firefox community taking up residence outside retail computer shops, offering to install Firefox. I can see the same community figuring out clever ways to add Firefox installation to other programs, giving Mozilla the same inside track on installations that Microsoft presumably will have.
Necessity is the mother of all invention, and it may well prod Mozilla's community to get deeply engaged in proselytizing and distributing Firefox in ways far beyond what it has hitherto done.
Sure, Microsoft's tactics (providing easy FTP access, etc.) will give it a healthy handicap in the competition, but community, not government, could make this one of Mozilla's single-best opportunities to leapfrog IE in Europe.
For those that like the idea of government and community helping Mozilla, just remember, as these Wall Street Journal readers do, that the hand that feeds today can quickly become the hand that takes tomorrow. What happens when Firefox gets too big for the EU's comfort? Will it coddle Opera into a competitive position next?
Even so, Mozilla's Shaver suggests a valid concern, noting that "if it takes a non-profit with a global community to overcome the (browser market's) barriers,...the market is fundamentally non-competitive." He may be right.
But that's not the question for me because I think government involvement here can end up hurting the market as much as it helps it. The question is whether Mozilla could win this war through superior marshaling of community ground forces. I think it could. Do you?
Update @ 12:45 PT: Mozilla CEO John Lilly offered this statement on Microsoft's actions in Europe:
It's impossible to evaluate what this means unless and until Microsoft describes -- completely and with specificity -- all the incentives and disincentives applicable to Windows OEMs. Without this it's impossible to tell if Microsoft is giving something with one hand and taking it away with the other, and more to the point, it's impossible to tell whether this does anything more than change the technical installation process of the OEMs and make life more difficult for people upgrading to Windows 7.
It's a good point. Microsoft's decision to remove the browser completely could well be a sneaky way to try to undermine the European Commission's case, and may have the effect of making the OEMs push Microsoft and Google bid against each other for inclusion.
In other words, same ol' same ol'. Microsoft will undoubtedly offer financial incentives, documented or not, to OEMs to include IE. In a fair fight Mozilla wins. But Microsoft doesn't have much incentive to fight fairly...unless forced to do so.
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