For years, Red Hat has happily sold Linux to Unix shops anxious to save money at equivalent or better performance. During this time, the company largely avoided Microsoft, which has tended to compete much higher up the stack. No longer. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that one of Microsoft's biggest opportunities lies in enterprise infrastructure and associated application development.
Red Hat, meet Redmond.
Red Hat wants to own the infrastructure market. The company is nearing its initial $1 billion goal, but has a far more audacious ambition: own half the associated middleware market.
This is a direct challenge to Microsoft, especially the manner in which Red Hat aims to go about it. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst noted in the company's earnings call earlier this year, Red Hat is "laser-like focused on that mission of commoditizing these key (infrastructure) layers" through open source.
It's not a strategy that will endear the open-source agitator to Microsoft.
After all, Microsoft is also focused on these opportunities, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told TechCrunch:
Biggest opportunity that we never talked about is enterprise infrastructure. Most of that goes to the database and mainframe vendors today who are in the business. We've got four billion in revenue and yet we're a small market share player.
Servers, there are going to be more new applications written in the next five years than any five-year period of time.
The two companies can't help but run into each other. Will they also be able to collaborate? They must. No customer is going to exclusively run either Microsoft or Red Hat technologies. The two have showed an ability to get along, if only a little bit. Can the two come together even as they seek to beat each other to bloody pulps?
Time will tell. But the market is about to get very interesting again. To achieve its goals, Red Hat must increase its investment in JBoss to make it an even better application platform that can effectively compete with Microsoft and its comprehensive infrastructure/middleware/tools suite.
As it does so, it's going to bump into Microsoft SharePoint, which is increasingly used as a platform for building applications, much like Red Hat's JBoss application server. SharePoint has come under threat from Google recently, but this is a battle Red Hat will have to fight, too.
As for Microsoft, I can't see how it can hope to compete with Red Hat's open-source strategy without including a healthy dose of open source, itself. Figuring out how to maintain its profit margins and sales potential, while simultaneously encouraging the growth of its developer ecosystem, is going to be difficult without open source.
It's a battle for the heart and soul of the enterprise, and it's going to get a little messy. It's about time.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Microsoft is launching an open-source foundation. Google is promising to keep user data portable. Both moves seem to cut against the financial self-interest of the two technology giants. Have the gods gone crazy, or are the business strategies of the industry's biggest players more subtle than "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"?
With a steady adoption of open-source business and development strategies, Microsoft has gone from open-source hater to open-source embracer in just a couple of years:
- Created its own open-source foundation, the CodePlex Foundation.
- Launched CodePlex, an open-source project-hosting site.
- Started actively contributing to outside open-source projects, including those of the Apache Software Foundation, which it also financially supports.
- Embeds open-source code such as JQuery into its own products.
- Releases complementary open-source projects to augment its customer relationship management software, SharePoint, and other products.
- Received "unanimous approval" by the Open Source Initiative for a few open-source licenses.
This isn't to whitewash all that Microsoft has not done well vis-a-vis open source (e.g., I'm not a fan of its patent-licensing arrangements, including the "interoperability" agreement with Novell), but clearly, Microsoft has been actively adopting open source as part of its business strategy. I'll address the "Why?" question below.
Google, for its part, has long supported open-source software. And it's easy to see why: the company makes its money from data, not software. The more people that have access to a great Web experience through Firefox or Chrome, or have computer access through low-cost Chrome OS-based Netbooks, the better, as they'll almost inevitably find their way to data-rich services from Google.
Google, in other words, has a strong interest in promoting open source and closed data.
All of this makes Google's Data Liberation Front--"an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products--so intriguing. The DLF appears to be giving away Google's single best option for monetizing its user base.
(Credit:
Google)
What is Google thinking? One answer may be that Google is trying to head off government scrutiny and intervention. As CNET News' Tom Krazit posits, "anything Google can do to show that it isn't planning to create an impenetrable fortress surrounding user data, it's going to do."
That's one cynical and likely accurate view. But I think that there's more to the story.
Google has created an array of services that increasingly dominate their respective markets. Consumers and businesses are apparently very happy to give more of their time and attention to Google products.
As such, Google's primary concern revolves around keeping those users from leaving. While the DLF makes it easier for customers to leave Google, it also obviates the need to do so. So long as Google customers feel sure that they can leave on their own terms, they likely won't.
Microsoft is starting to learn the same thing. Its customers tend to use Microsoft products because they work, not because some evil genius in Redmond dreamed up diabolical ways to keep them locked in through closed file formats.
Don't believe me? Look at Microsoft's support for CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), a new content standard that promises to do for content management systems what SQL did for the database market. CMIS enables information portability between different content repositories. (Disclosure: Alfresco, my employer, was a founding member of CMIS, along with IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and others.)
In other words, CMIS makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint into, say, Documentum. It also enables application vendors to write to the CMIS standard, rather than specifically to SharePoint.
CMIS Interoperability Standard
(Credit: Microsoft, EMC, IBM)Microsoft has been actively engaged in drafting the CMIS specification and appears to be a strong proponent of it. Why? Why would Microsoft, which has much to gain from SharePoint being the center of a new lock-in strategy, support an open standard that makes it easy to move content out of SharePoint and into competing repositories?
Because Microsoft knows that it can win.
Take Microsoft's pre-CMIS partnership with Documentum. As CMS Watch anecdotally references, SharePoint is much easier to use than Documentum, making any partnership/integration between the two a largely one-way street from Documentum to SharePoint, just one reason that SharePoint has boomed, even as the economy has busted. This is only going to get better for Microsoft with CMIS interoperability.
Interoperability favors the vendor whose products are easier to use. By opening up, Microsoft is opening its doors to more customers and, hence, more money.
Google and Microsoft aren't supporting open source or open standards or open data because they grew up as Boy Scouts or Girls Scouts, and feel that it's the right thing to do.
Rather, they're increasingly engaged in open business strategies because they recognize the financial rewards that can stem from doing so. Openness is not a religion; it's a business strategy--a strategy that Microsoft and Google are learning to play too.
We like to ascribe secret designs--nefarious and otherwise--to software vendors. Super-secretive Apple, in particular, tends to excite endless rumor-mongering as to what it's up to. It seems to me, however, that Apple and its top competitors, including Google and Microsoft, are increasingly transparent about their plans. We simply don't pay attention to the signs.
Let's start with Apple. The big rumor at present is the company's alleged work on a tablet computer, kicked off by The Wall Street Journal's bold declaration that "people familiar with the situation" suggest Apple is working on "a new touch-screen gadget."
While the rumor may be true, it's highly unusual for anyone "familiar with the situation" of anything at Apple to talk about it. After all, the punishment for divulging confidential Apple information is death. Or worse: the icy glare of Steve Jobs.
But we don't really have to look to rumors for this one. As Cult of Mac reports, Snow Leopard includes a range of functionality--including a full-size virtual keyboard--that makes a lot of sense on a touch-screen device (one bigger than an iPhone).
Conclusive? Nah. But a very good sign of what Apple is thinking.
If you use Google Chrome and Google's web applications, then you're already running Google Chrome OS. Just maximize Google Chrome's window and imagine that each tab is an instance of an application.
Perhaps Google is more open than most because it increasingly works with open-source code and communities, and secrecy doesn't exactly lend itself well to fostering either of those, but still....
Even Microsoft, that reputed bastion of secret monopolistic plans, is pretty open about future product direction. For example, Steve Ballmer has called SharePoint Microsoft's "next big operating system". This may not mean much to many, but it speaks volumes about Microsoft's desire to marry its personal computer dominance to cloud and/or server-based computing.
Want to see where Microsoft thinks computing is going? Yes, you can read the documentation on Azure, but you'd find a much more tangible example by installing SharePoint.
Perhaps we should spend less time guessing at what such leading vendors may announce, and instead take a closer look at what they've already released. The clues are often hidden in plain sight.
This may herald a new era of transparency, as technology success increasingly depends upon community outreach, outreach that requires the ability to handle code in advance of a general release. Or it may simply signal the fact that it's very hard to keep secrets in any industry, much less the software industry, particularly when success depends more upon execution than whizbang innovation.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
While the open-source crowd gets (rightly) excited by Linux's growing market share, three companies are pulling the rug out from under the feet of traditional operating systems.
Red Hat is winning in Linux while IBM cleans up the Unix market. But those are increasingly yesterday's markets as Microsoft, Google, and VMware create different breeds of operating system, each tuned to the strength of its product portfolio.
The easiest to understand are Google and VMware. Google, with its Linux distribution Chrome OS, is placing secondary emphasis on the operating system and primary emphasis on where it takes you: the Web. Given Google's strength in cloud computing, this makes perfect sense. Google needs an operating system just long enough to move users "off" their personal computers (or mobile phones, for which Google has developed Android) and into its cloud services: Google Apps, Search, Wave, etc.
While Google won't find this strategy to be easy, it has the brand and expertise to bring "desktop" substance to cloud applications.
Similarly, VMware's vSphere attempts to untether computing from "desktops" and on-premises servers. VMware describes vSphere as:
...the industry's first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud--a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds--delivering IT infrastructure as a service.
VMware recently acquired open-source Java leader SpringSource to complement this strategy, giving developers an easy way to build, deploy, and manage Java-based applications for vSphere (and beyond). With Java applications already running at full steam in vSphere, this move should serve to heighten the value of vSphere.
And then there's Microsoft. The company prints billions of dollars worth of profits each quarter from its Windows franchise, yet for years it has been quietly developing its next big operating system. And no, I'm not referring to Windows 7.
With Windows under fire from VMware in virtualization (though Gartner thinks Microsoft stands to gain on VMware) and from Google in Web-based applications, Microsoft has created a bridge "between personal productivity and line-of-business applications," one that stitches together Microsoft's "desktop" dominance with its cloud ambitions.
It's called SharePoint, and with over 100 million seats and $1 billion in revenue, the odds are that your company already has it installed.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer long ago declared that "SharePoint is the definitive operating system or platform for the middle tier," and I don't think he's using the term "operating system" lightly.
Increasingly, SharePoint is the center of the Microsoft universe, at least, for enterprise computing. SharePoint serves as the hub for Microsoft's suite of operating systems, applications, and third-party software. It is a content application server, of sorts, one that provides the platform upon which so much of Microsoft's value is now being built.
I've disparaged SharePoint in the past for its tendency to lock customers into its proprietary repository. But let's be clear: a large number of companies seem perfectly happy to make that trade-off and are actively using SharePoint at the heart of their intranets, extranets, and Web sites.
Between Microsoft SharePoint, Google Chrome OS, and VMware vSphere, we're in for real innovation in what "operating system" means. While this shift will take awhile, leaving traditional vendors plenty of time to make money in traditional operating systems--hey, companies are still making money in green-screen software--the future of the operating system is almost certain to look different from vanilla Windows, Linux, or Unix.
Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, offers an open-source content application server that has been positioned in the past as directly competitive with SharePoint.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
As news broke this week that Microsoft and Nokia would be partnering to (brace yourself!) port Office to Nokia phones, followed by the equally momentous (or not) news that (sit down for this one!) Microsoft will replace Entourage with Outlook for Mac OS X, I couldn't help but agree with Larry Dignan's assessment of the Nokia deal:
Simply put, Nokia and Microsoft are the equivalent of two St. Bernards that are forced to run in 90 degree heat and high humidity. They're big. They're winded. And they could knock you over--if they could only catch you.
I happen to compete with Microsoft in one area that it is growing from strength to strength (SharePoint), but for everyone else, Microsoft is becoming a footnote in the history of computing.
Sure, it's still big. Yes, it still competes vigorously. But with the odd exception (Bing, perhaps), Microsoft just doesn't seem to have the energy to compete anymore. One indication of this is that most of the dirt that Roy Schestowitz digs up on Microsoft is from old court records. It's as if Microsoft struggles even to be nasty anymore.
So Microsoft dresses up tired press releases like the Outlook on Mac announcement "like they've been working in the lab for some time now and have had some technological breakthrough that allows them to bring Outlook to Max OS X," as ZDNet's Sam Diaz puts it. The breakthrough would be putting Outlook in the cloud, Google Apps-style. It would be creating products that wow in the same way that Apple's do.
But Microsoft doesn't wow in its traditional businesses. Surface, yes. Project Natal, yes. But there doesn't seem to be much creative gas left in the enterprise computing tank.
And perhaps that's the point. How much innovation can there be, really, in Office? Or the Windows operating system? These are old paradigms that don't need window dressing: they need the window shattered and shifted to completely new methodologies of computing, similar to what Google (Web) and Apple (entertainment) are doing.
The desktop is a tired metaphor. This is why Google's Chrome OS, while not necessarily manna from heaven, is a welcome change, and just the sort of thing that Microsoft should be investing in, but is structurally, financially incapable of promoting in the same way and to the same degree that Google does. Because Microsoft dies if it innovates its way out of its Office and Windows businesses too quickly.
Google may be resorting to some of Microsoft's most frustrating practices, using its strong products to prop up weak siblings, but at least those siblings promise a different mode of computing.
Apple offers a premium "desktop" experience that makes old feel new. Google replaces the "desktop" with the Web. Open source commoditizes and then innovates enterprise IT, as Accenture's Alex Wied recently wrote. What does this leave Microsoft?
It leaves Microsoft desperately needing to refresh its approach to the market. Immediately. It can live off its billions for a long, long time, but it risks becoming like CA: ever-present but not very relevant.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Drupal logo
Baris Wanschers has posted a great review of 10 cool Web sites running Microsoft SharePoint, apparently to prove how good SharePoint is as a Web publishing tool. But I can't help but smile at the irony that Wanschers' site runs Drupal, not SharePoint.
Wanschers writes:
Because so many friends and colleagues of [mine] think of SharePoint as a boring, team-site-only Document Management System I decided to show them some great-looking SharePoint publishing sites and prove them otherwise.
He then provides several examples (Ferrari, Starbucks, and more), but the best counterexample to his post is the "paper" his post is written on: Drupal, an excellent open-source Web content management and publishing system.
To be fair, Wanschers describes himself as both a SharePoint and Drupal developer, so it's natural that he use both (though his blog has exclusively covered SharePoint since its March 2009 launch). But for me it's instructive that however much he may talk about SharePoint as a Web publishing tool, Drupal is what he actually uses to do the job.
Actions speak louder than words.
He's not alone. In fact, with over 1 million downloads each year, it's safe to say that Wanschers is in good company in preferring Drupal for Web publishing. FedEx, Nike, R.E.M., and many others share Wanschers' preference for Drupal for Web publishing.
Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, both partners and competes with Microsoft SharePoint and Drupal.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
If you're part of the "cool kid" developer crowd, you're undoubtedly writing your new application with Ruby on Rails, and spend a lot of time talking about Git, Squeak, or Memcached.
But if you want a job, apparently you should get back to ancient technologies like Java and .Net, according to new data from IT employment company Dice.com, cited in Baseline magazine. In addition to those programming heavyweights, other enterprise bellwethers like Oracle, SharePoint, and SAP also make the cut.
On Java, Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice.com, sees value in formal training, per Baseline's account:
Online developers with proficiency in Java, particularly with J2EE, can still find good prospects within the market. Experience is valued, but Silver suggests that Sun's Certified Java programmer (SCJP) offers a leg up on the competition.
Certification? That's about as Old World as you can find. And yet it seems to work.
Apparently, new-age Web technologies will get you a date, but old-school technologies are the best bet if you want a job.
And with TechServe Alliance finding 16,000 IT jobs lost in June 2009, and new Janco Associates data (via Baseline) reporting an overall IT salary decline of 0.19 percent, but a 0.22 percent increase in enterprise IT salaries, it may be time to double down on those "boring" old enterprise technologies.
Employment is pretty sexy, even if Java and .Net are not.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Enterprise software is coming down to four big choices: Cisco Systems or IBM or Oracle or Microsoft.
Hewlett-Packard? HP is doing very well in hardware, but it lacks the overarching software strategy that fuels these other four.
Even as the industry consolidates into these big ecosystem vendors, it's becoming ripe for a new kind of hegemonic, all-out war.
It's a fun time to be in the industry. For one thing, it's fascinating to watch (and, in some cases, assist) each of the Big Four to use open source as a strategic club with which to pummel their neighbors. Open source, thy name is capitalism.
But open source is just one part of it. The bigger part is conflicting product-level competition. Microsoft dominates the desktop and uses it as a "home base" from which to compete in other markets. Cisco spreads the power of the network into a wide variety of complementary businesses. Oracle uses the database as the center of the enterprise-computing universe, but surrounds it with a host of exceptional software.
And IBM? Well, IBM enriches its massive software business with integrated hardware and services that no one has yet been able to match.
Each, of course, is starting to infiltrate the others' safety zone with new initiatives. IBM, as announced on Monday, is pairing up with Brocade to go after Cisco's core networking market. Cisco, for its part, is stepping on just about everybody's toes with collaboration initiatives that veer toward Microsoft's SharePoint, even while it adds a server line to compete with IBM.
Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems to help give it a leg up on IBM and Microsoft through Java, Sun's hardware lines, and MySQL. Microsoft, for its part, is expanding into everyone else's markets with the ubiquitous SharePoint.
This is only the beginning. The question is, "The beginning of what?" In some ways, this dramatic industry consolidation reduces customer choice. But in other ways, it enhances it.
Given the centrality of software to this enterprise cage match, it also begs the question, "When will SAP join the fray?" Last week, I spent time at the Open Forum Europe conference, where I repeatedly heard the question raised, "When will Europe produce a dominant software company?"
SAP's strength in enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software could serve as a nice complement to one of the Big Four's product lines--or as a beachhead for the assembly and deployment of an additional, independent software ecosystem.
Red Hat could do the same, fostering an open-source ecosystem to rival that of the Big Four, mostly proprietary software vendors. While the company has shown little ambition beyond infrastructure software, there are hints of a growing interest to sell (and build?) solutions. Red Hat's recent channel expansion through Synnex suggests that it may be toe-dipping its way toward a larger vision of being the hub of the open-source "wheel."
Given this waxing and waning of competition in enterprise software, I suppose that the real question is, "On which ecosystem are you betting your business?" Enterprise IT is a study in heterogeneity, but for how long?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
This week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco surprised me: I thought the content was, on balance, the best it's ever offered.
In part this stems from a new pragmatism that has settled on the commercial open-source world, where we're increasingly striving to solve customers' business problems, not vendors' business-model problems. It shows up in some of the event's discussions--a few of which are captured in Matt Aslett's excellent OSBC synopsis and in Dries Buytaert's OSBC wrap-up.
North Bridge Venture Partners' Michael Skok came up with one of my favorite lines from the conference, as detailed in Aslett's post:
If we have a better product, and it happens to be open source, we're going to win. But it has to be in that order.
The application of open source to business was highly pronounced in the various keynotes, in particular those delivered on the second day of the conference by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Microsoft President of North America Robert Youngjohns, and IBM Vice President of Linux and Open Source Bob Sutor.
Stephen Walli captures the gist of their various presentations and gives the winning ticket to Sutor. As Walli notes, Sutor bucked the trend in the other keynotes to describe open source as "just about business," insisting instead that "it's NOT about business. It's about solving hard problems."
That's a great distinction, and an important reminder.
Microsoft, for its part, asked the open-source community to judge it by its actions. Its actions have hardly been consistent, and many have been destructive of open source as Dana Blankenhorn argues. Still, I'm hopeful that the vocal minority within Microsoft will power the company to more transparent, open communications with the world.
What may be happening, however, is that Microsoft is adopting open-source principles to power the proliferation of SharePoint. As ZDNet's Oliver Marks highlights, it's free to evaluate, offers community-based add-ons, and has widespread distribution via Microsoft attaching a free version to every copy of Windows Server.
SharePoint is quickly becoming Microsoft's next operating system, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has confirmed, with customers required to use it in conjunction with Microsoft's other software.
It's a one-way street into Microsoft, with a proprietary data repository to make it difficult and expensive to get out. Cisco Systems is fighting back, as is IBM, but few have figured out how to distribute as efficiently as Microsoft. Open source may be the only alternative to Microsoft.
Is this what we can expect the proprietary software world to learn from open source--distribution efficiency but not the freedom that accompanies it in open source? If this is all we get from the new pragmatism in open source, we'll go backward, not forward.
This was the best OSBC ever, with standing room only on the first day, and full sessions throughout. But if the lessons we're learning are simply enhanced ways to lock in customers, we're going in the wrong direction.
Disclosures: I am chair of the Open Source Business Conference and vice president of business development for Alfresco, an open-source competitor to Microsoft SharePoint, which surely factors into my view on SharePoint.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn't free of Redmond's long arm just yet.
Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of Mac users stick with Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.
I love my Mac, but I couldn't use it without Office. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.
Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.
The strategy won't work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won't matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.
No, to end Microsoft's latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).
Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.
What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?
