The Open Road

There was a time when Microsoft could skimp on Internet Explorer innovation. Having trounced its Netscape rival, Microsoft rested on its IE laurels for years, barely updating the browser.

Today, Microsoft can't afford to rest on any laurels, least of all with IE.

In part this is due to rising competition. The open-source Mozilla Firefox browser, for example, now tops 24 percent market share and it, along with the Google Chrome browser, and Apple's Safari browser, regularly push well beyond IE's comparatively glacial development.

However, the biggest challenge to Microsoft's IE development inertia is Microsoft itself. As Mozilla's Asa Dotzler posits:

That [IE] team has some really strong people and they're not going to let another release go by where they're still seen as badly trailing. Not with Office moving to the Web. Not with Search and other web services becoming huge revenue opportunities.

Falling short with IE 9 would be the last straw for Web developers' little remaining faith in Microsoft and so they won't miss this opportunity.

The browser used to be a sideshow to Microsoft's Windows and Office cash cows. In the future, however, the browser is the gateway to the next generation of Microsoft dominance...or irrelevance.

As the world moves online, how well Microsoft delivers an innovative browser experience will largely determine the future of the company.

At the same time, how well Mozilla delivers a neutral, innovative Firefox is the industry's best defense against Microsoft and Google too tightly coupling their browsers to their Web services.

It's therefore time for Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, and others with a vested interest in an open gateway to an open Web to put their development resources where their mouths are. Contribute to Firefox. Microsoft (and Google) has an interest in building a better browser, yes, but to ensure that browser runs others' services as well as Microsoft's, Microsoft must be kept honest.

Firefox is the best way to accomplish this.

Microsoft says "There's plenty of innovation in the pipeline" for Windows Mobile. For those of us who haven't considered a Windows-based phone since the iPAQ's decline, the real question is, "If Microsoft has an innovative Windows Mobile experience, why is the company keeping it such a secret?"

Seriously, where has Microsoft been on mobile? It's a market that the best companies in the software industry are targeting, including Google and Apple, but Microsoft seems to be AWOL. CNET's Ina Fried notes some wishful thinking on Microsoft's part to get back in the smartphone game, but I'm not seeing it.

As Mark Sigal highlights, Google is approaching mobile with an open approach; Apple is winning with a closed approach; and Microsoft? Well, Microsoft seems to still think the phone is a PDA, with little innovation (closed or open) that would trouble a consumer to bother buying a Windows-powered mobile device.

Perhaps that is why Microsoft's smartphone market share has now dipped below 10 percent and shows no sign of resurrection.

This isn't about open source versus proprietary software. It's about focus, something that Microsoft seems not to have given mobile in a long, long time. Steve Ballmer was willing to spend roughly $45 billion on Yahoo to compete in search, but has managed only a $500 million acquisition of Danger to compete in mobile.

This despite advertising, computing, and (of course) communications moving to mobile devices. What has Microsoft been thinking? Or not thinking, as the case may be?

Yes, Microsoft is now partnering with Nokia to up its mobile game, but ZDNet's Larry Dignan is spot on calling this a "dog of a deal born from weakness," not strength.

What Microsoft needs is to innovate. Or at least to copy someone else's innovations. But it appears to be doing neither. This is inexcusable for a company with its resources and development talent. Microsoft is a great company, one that occasionally turns an industry on its head, as it has with SharePoint to the stodgy Enterprise Content Management market.

But Windows Mobile? It's lame.

This isn't a demand that Microsoft miraculously achieve mobile perfection. Heck, the iPhone has taught us that, great as it is, "good enough" is more than good enough (e.g., it comes with an underpowered camera...that everyone seems to use).

Microsoft is fond of talking about just how much it spends on research and development. But it's time to stop talking and start shipping. I've heard rumors of an exceptional mobile product on the way from Microsoft, but that's all I ever hear: something "in the cooker" that will "rock the world soon!"

As Morrissey used to croon for The Smiths, "How soon is now?"

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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.

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Microsoft's Internet Explorer's market share is absolutely falling. The question is, by how much?

I've reported before that Internet Explorer (IE) drops 5 percent market share points each year, while Mozilla Firefox gains 5 percentage points per year. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that IE's market share may be dropping more precipitously than previously reported, falling to 60 percent share in June 2009 instead of the 68 percent share expected.

Or is it?

The answer may depend on the source of the information, and the reliability of its data. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler uses StatCounter data to discern a 60 percent share for IE but, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan points out, this data may not hold up.

For Microsoft's sake, it had better hope not, as this chart compiled by Dotzler shows:

That's not the sort of chart with which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to sweeten his coffee in the morning.

Net Applications, the other big source of browser market share data, still hasn't posted its results for June 2009, noting that it is trying to make sense of "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics."

Given that market share data isn't a one-month phenomenon, it's not necessarily helpful to celebrate or fret over the June data, especially since much of the market share share data is going to get skewed in the summer months, anyway. For example, given Firefox's disproportionately large following in Europe, coupled with Europe's disproportionately long holiday season in the summer, I'd expect to see Firefox drop some percentage points against IE through August, only to rebound strongly in September.

Regardless of short-term variations, one thing seems clear: Firefox is gaining on IE. Microsoft spent too long enjoying its browser dominance, and not enough time innovating. It's starting to pump R&D dollars into IE again, but it's not yet clear whether its monolithic approach to browser development can compete in the long term with Mozilla's community-developed Firefox.

Microsoft needs to compete again, or risks seeing even StatCounter's data understate just how quickly it's falling.

Mozilla, for its part, faces a host of new challenges. It can't afford to waste much time with back slaps and high-fives. The browser has become the center of computing. Microsoft isn't going to give up easily, nor will Google or Apple.

Game on.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Even as CIOs accelerate adoption of open source in an effort to trim costs and improve innovation, the world's top system integrators (SIs) have largely played it safe on the sidelines. Accenture, given its close partnership with Microsoft, has perhaps been one of the most conservative SIs when it comes to open source.

Or so it has appeared. Despite a partnership with SpringSource, an open-source infrastructure leader, Accenture's open-source activities have largely gone unnoticed. Even Accenture's Innovation Center for Open Source, a collaboration with Red Hat and other open-source vendors, was more whispered about than promoted.

I caught up with Alex Wied, senior manager at Accenture and head of its Innovation Center for Open Source, and Tony Roby, partner in Accenture's Global Architecture and Core Technologies group, to find out what, exactly, Accenture has been doing with open source, and how the global consulting firm expects to use open source going forward. They collaborated on the answers to my questions below.

Accenture is not the first company that comes to mind when one thinks of open source. After all, you have a joint venture with Microsoft and have been pretty quiet on open source. Is open source alive and well at Accenture? If so, what are the areas of focus for Accenture?

I'm curious to find out why that is the case! Accenture has strong relationships with many leading technology companies--that is what our clients expect.

Open source is growing within both Accenture and our client base. We continue to be substantial users of open source, particularly in custom Java development, and our focus is expanding beyond this space to cover the gamut of open source portals, content management, business intelligence and data management. We also continue to contribute to open-source projects where we expect the results to benefit our clients.

Is open source client-led or Accenture-led? Meaning, are your customers asking for it or are you embracing open-source solutions for your own reasons? If so, what are those reasons? If clients are asking for it, what reasons do they cite?

It's a mixture. There is a tremendous amount of education still to be done regarding open source. We have clients who still have policies not to use open source at all; others who want to use open source wherever possible. But the majority is in between: they are open to using whatever makes most sense from a technical and commercial perspective.

What is clear is that the current economy is driving many who were ambivalent about open source to explore its potential more closely. Regardless of the economic environment, Accenture is a strong open-source advocate and will continue to work with our clients to help them achieve business benefits with it.

Is "vendor lock-in" a serious concern for your clients? If they had to choose between zero cost and 100 percent lock-in or a hefty cost and no lock-in, which would they choose? Or is that even a fair question?

Yes and no. No one wants to be locked in, particularly if that lock in results in ever-increasing expenditure that is disconnected from the value being realized.

But our clients in general look for a balance. "One throat to choke" is high up in the requirements for making major technology investments and is often prioritized over "lock-in." Also, in the context of very large projects, the cost of the software compared to everything else is frequently a small part of the equation.

Nevertheless, we are seeing a noticeable increase in the use of open source, driven largely by the "free" aspect. Few are fooled by the notion of open source being free (as in no cost): lower cost, flexibility and the ability to be supported at modest cost are key drivers of the increased uptake.

Are there particular open-source projects that are of interest to you/Accenture? Which ones, and why?

We do a lot of work with the Spring Framework, so I would say that has historically had the bulk of our interest. That said, we have people active in a number of community projects and we are making increasing use of Alfresco, Liferay, and Talend, to name a few in the technology area.

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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.)

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Stephen Fry, British author and host of a book/BBC series on his travels in the United States, offers up a paean to America in the May 9 edition of The Spectator. At times lightly scabrous, often hilarious, Fry gives a depiction of America that sounds much like Silicon Valley today:

[With some not insignificant exceptions]...America is comprised of the descendants of men and women who at some point over the last 300 years or so wanted to improve their lives. They left their miserable shtetls and peasant hovels and urban slums and blighted potato fields and sailed the Atlantic. 'We can do better,' they said as one. '___ Europe.' They were animated by a restless desire to move on and make something of their lives...A belief in improvability is written into the gene pool of their descendants, today's Americans....

We Europeans, on the other hand, we are descended from those who said, 'Oh, well, could be worse, I suppose. Not getting into one of those nasty ships and going to a new world. Typical of uppity cousin Frank to think he can just march off and start again. Who does he think he is?'

Regardless of whether you buy into Fry's depiction of Europeans, I think the first paragraph describes very well Silicon Valley's gene pool and, indeed, the gene pool of the wider technology community. It's no longer about becoming American, per se: it's about becoming a techie.

This is why it's so critical to open that gene pool further to immigrants, as Microsoft's Bill Gates has been arguing since 2005. It's also why we, as the technology industry, need to "___ Europe," as it were, by discarding a too plodding and careful approach to innovation.

Cisco is a good example here for the wider industry. Despite its massive heft, the company is using its cash hoard to attack 30 different markets, as BusinessWeek reports. Cisco could content itself with simply incrementally improving its network equipment business, but instead it's dramatically challenging the industry's status quo well beyond its core business.

We need more of this. We need to continue to push the envelope on innovation. We need to continue to import those modern-day pilgrims that leave China, India, Europe, and elsewhere and ensure that they want to stay.

That's what Silicon Valley and the technology industry have long been about. It's in our gene pool. Especially now, downturn be damned, we must do more.

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It used to be said that open source is purely a commodifying force in the software industry, that open source can't innovate. While we've had Mozilla Firefox and other projects to demonstrate open-source innovation, the impression nonetheless persists.

One way to crush the idea completely is for open source to help shape a new market, rather than influence an old market. Online video, despite 14.3 billion videos watched online in December 2008 in the United States alone, according to ComScore, is a nascent market with no 800-pound gorillas building the industry in their image.

Online video is up for grabs.

Shay David, co-founder and chief technology officer of Kaltura, an open-source video company (disclosure: I am an adviser to Kaltura), believes that open source is the key to creating a robust, innovative online video market:

For anyone who is part of the video universe, the key question that remains open is what drives value in this brave new world. How can publishers, advertisers, and technology enablers make money in a world in which delivery (CDN) is commoditized, display opportunities are abundant (driving CPMs for video advertising down), and audiences expect to get everything for free? The short answer, I believe, is to focus on innovation--of formats, user experiences, content, or delivery.

And here is where open-source video enters the picture: It is a development methodology and distribution strategy that allows each company in the ecosystem to focus on what it does best, instead of replicating the efforts of others. Open-source video...is being adopted at every level of the ecosystem by industry leaders such as Akamai, Mozilla, and Wikipedia.

Its premise is simple: Video is too important of a medium to be controlled by a single player. By espousing the principles of openness at all levels, including formats, technology, and content, and by collaborating in the development process, video can enjoy the force multipliers that we have seen in other areas of open-source software. The result is a better user experience, a reduction in the total cost of ownership, and a focus on innovative value-driven results.

I agree, and I believe that Kaltura and other open-source video companies and projects, some which have banded together to form the Open Video Alliance, have the opportunity to prove that open source can not only innovate, but also surpass proprietary software and proprietary standards in innovation.

It's a bold ambition, one that also could be applied to OpenX in online advertising, MySQL in Web-centric databases, and other areas. I don't know that open source is necessarily the best solution to every problem, but it certainly seems to be a viable, free-market alternative to how our industry has traditionally formed: one big vendor corners the market, and we spend decades trying to get out of its grip.

In open-source video, we have the means to foster an open industry, one that lets individual developers focus on their respective core competencies, while customers get lower costs and reduced lock-in. Sign me up.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Kaltura.

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Vinnie Mirchandani writes provocatively on his Deal Architect blog that Oracle's penchant for acquisitions may be hampering its ability to innovate in-house and write code:

In existing Oracle internally developed and acquired products in the last five years, Oracle's enhancements have been anemic.

Oracle, in my opinion, has forgotten how to develop code. Its top executives are deal makers, not technology visionaries. Worse, when it comes to their acquisitions, they cannot retain or easily replace the entrepreneurial talent...The rapid pace of acquisitions has also had a significant impact on Oracle support.

Customers report frequent and confusing changes to Oracle's support policies, as so many products go in and out of stages of "lifetime support." Little has been done to rationalize support across products--other than, of course, raise maintenance to 22 percent.

Arguably, it simply does not matter: even through acquisitions, Oracle has managed to deliver increased value to its customers.

Even so, a big question is looming as to whether Oracle, which spends just 10 to 15 percent of its budget on research and development, can keep up with competitors and, in particular, open source.

"Open source?!" you say, "that's just a big commodifier of others' innovations." Not so. In fact, if you look at the budgets of most emerging open-source companies, we spend significantly more on development than Oracle and, importantly, more of that R&D budget goes toward real innovation, not reinventing the wheel. Indeed, that's the whole premise behind open-source development: efficient reuse of code.

That's not the whole story, however. As Mirchandani points out in a follow-on post, Oracle customers are troubled by its support morass. Such customers are likely to be enticed by open-source offerings, which make support, not license fees, the centerpiece of their offerings.

Oracle has made a lot of noise about its Unbreakable Linux and has suggested that the impetus behind its Red Hat knock-off is that its customers couldn't find Oracle-class support at Red Hat.

Well, Oracle is probably right, but not in the way it intended: Red Hat's support and value proposition is apparently much better than Oracle's, given that Red Hat continues to leave Unbreakable Linux in the dust.

Oracle is a great company that continues to make smart moves. However, it is becoming more and more like Microsoft: less about innovation and more about distribution. That's not a bad thing. Not at all. But Mirchandani's comments point to a few areas, like support, where Oracle still needs to get its execution right for the strategy to pay off in the long term.

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