If you attended Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, you can be excused for thinking you showed up at the partner event for Red Hat, Google, or Salesforce.
After all, Microsoft's new partner initiatives rely heavily on concepts devised and delivered by these companies:
Tech watchers will see lots of familiar concepts in software behemoth Microsoft's revamped go-to-market strategy....[Microsoft] proclaimed its newfound focus on delivering software and services to customers via "the cloud," using a subscription-based model popularized by companies like Red Hat, Websense and Salesforce.com.
Microsoft is smart: Why reinvent the business model wheel when others have pioneered successful ways to deliver software value? Of course, Microsoft has never been the most innovative of companies - it has become the market behemoth that it is by out-executing its competitors, not by out-thinking them.
But this may be one area in which Microsoft needs to think a bit more. As The Motley Fool notes,
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(Credit:
The 451 Group)
Venture funding for open-source companies rose to $115 million in the second quarter, a 14 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to The 451 Group. And funding for the first half of the year is up 62 percent over the first half of 2007.
That's all the good news.
The bad news is that seed and series A funding remains anemic and may continue to remain so while venture-backed companies struggle generally to find a public exit, i.e. an initial public offering. In the second quarter, there were exactly zero IPOs for venture-backed companies--whether they were open source or otherwise.
While the open-source freeze may perhaps not be a cause for as deep concern as The 451 Group suggests--VCs need to see returns from their existing open-source investments before they start to pile on more--it does mean that there have been better times to try to get an open-source venture funded.
With that said, investors who have seen strong returns from open source (e.g., Peter Fenton at Benchmark and David Skok at Matrix) are actively investing and vetting new open-source projects. For those with the right credentials or track record, these are the investors to approach. But given their experience in investing in open source, they're also the least likely to be swayed by mere downloads.
(Credit:
Matrix Partners)
Bob Lisbonne has long been one of my favorite venture capitalists and, indeed, people. He's a warm, intelligent person. I've passed more than one bad venture idea his way and had him very kindly tell me it was a pile of potty.
So it was with mixed feelings that I read his email today that he's leaving Matrix Partners to possibly rejoin the ranks of the entrepreneurs. Here's the guy who, while senior vice president and general manager of Browser Products at Netscape, helped to give us Firefox. Here's the guy who invested in promising open source-related companies like PostPath and LucidEra. And now he's leaving. Or coming back.
Or both:
Over the years, I've tried to make time for my own little software projects during nights and weekends, but, as you can imagine, that's whetted my appetite more than satiated it.
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Microsoft has an offer open-source startups are having a hard time refusing. Should they?
(Credit:
Microsoft (Sam Ramji))
That's the question I asked myself while reading Mary Jo Foley's excellent article that dissects Microsoft's open-source strategy. As it turns out, it's very similar to Microsoft's general partner strategy: embrace and envelope. (Or embrace, extend, and extinguish, as used to be Microsoft's marching orders.)
Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft's goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn't want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows ecosystem by integrating with Active Directory, Microsoft Office, Expression designer tools, System Center systems-management wares and SQL Server database.
Sounds OK, right? Sort of. As Mary Jo continues:
Microsoft's OSS strategy makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. It's another way for Microsoft to try to make Linux obsolete, and not look as obviously ruthless doing so.
Therein lies the problem. Most open-source applications get evaluated on Windows. Most go into production on Linux. There are good reasons for this.
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