- Martin Taylor, RIP (Retire in Peace?)
- Bad product strategy gets you press (Google)
- Shocking! Microsoft Office 2007 delayed again
- Thanks to SCO for making Linux famous (now go away)
- On hipness and open source
- A time for Europe - Open source
- Windows as the new high performance OS?
- Steve Howe (DrKW) and the difficulties of enterprise-driven open source
- Marc Fleury @ JBoss (The JiHat continues)
- Frustrated by Web 2.0's lack of multi-site integration
June 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Martin Taylor, RIP (Retire in Peace?)
I found this out in passing at OSBC London: Martin Taylor, the supposed devil-prince of anti-Linux marketing, has left Microsoft. (Apparently, I'm the last to know.)
I always liked and respected Martin (apparently because I've been subverted by Microsoft, as Dave says. :-). I'm really sorry that he's gone. He was a competitor worthy of the competition.
I have no idea where he went. Can anyone fill me in? It would be classic if he, like many Microsofties before him, has left to start, join, or fund an open source startup.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 30, 2006 11:18 AM
June 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Bad product strategy gets you press (Google)
In the past both Matt and I have been critical of Google's mediocre offerings beyond its core search. BusinessWeek is running an interview with Google VP Marissa Mayer where she essentially says "we throw things at the wall and see if they stick" which seems in stark contrast to an engineering driven organization. It also speaks to Matt's post about the lack of innovation coming from Google.
Typically, companies succeed because they tackle a problem and do the best possible job solving it. Throwing a bunch of things into beta is an interesting "strategy" but not what great long-term products and companies are built on. There is a point when all this Web 2.0 development stuff leaves users with an abundance of mediocre products to use. This aspect is pointed out by BusinessWeek in a different piece So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits
Google's problem isn't a string of failures, then, but rather the middling performance of many products that survive. In fact, it seems far from achieving even its intended 20% to 40% success ratio. This may be contributing to the internal debate that rages at Google's Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters over how to deliver more search users to the new products.
I point the Google situation out because they have a luxury that most small companies don't have, a whopping market cap associated with their core advertising business. They can experiment with homegrown products that cost virtually nothing to build and if they don't generate huge revenue it doesn't matter in the near-term. But this strategy doesn't work for startups. Period.
I've recently been through meetings with several companies who are contemplating tossing new products over the fence in hopes of growth and community. On the OSS startup side it's very difficult to maintain focus. The whole company must be heading in the same direction and working toward a common goal. It's the only way to survive and succeed. And really the same goes for proprietary companies who are putting old code out as OSS--they run the risk of being distracted with no discernible benefits. Building community is extremely difficult. Just because you open source your software doesn't mean people care. It takes a long time and a great deal of dedication to be relevant in the OSS space.
Previously and Links:
Marissa Meyer on Valleywag
Google...innovative?!? Come on!
BusinessWeek/Open Sources Vulcan Mind-meld
Open the Door for Open Source Deals
Levanta--the comeback kid of Linux?
Novell: Better than it appears
The most hated man in open source?
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 30, 2006 09:09 AM
June 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Shocking! Microsoft Office 2007 delayed again
I am finally back to sitting in front of a computer and not sitting in meetings all day (more on that in the future) and have been trying to catch up with a ridiculous amount of email. I also learned the hard way that the T-mobile Blackberry doesn't allow you to create folders for your messages unless you use Exchange, so I am doubly burdened. Since I was so overwhelmed both with work and data I am trying to simplify and organize better so that I can keep things in the right places and access them as needed. So, when I saw that Office 2007 (note to MS marketing--get rid of the year in the product name, it looks incredibly silly at this point) was going to be late I started thinking again about replacing Office both personally and on larger scales. The fact is Office 2007 dramatically overshoots most user needs but forces you to pay for apps like Outlook which are currently included. The strategy behind the new Office product seems to look like this:
1. add-in as much crap as possible
2. take away the apps people are familiar with unless they buy a more expensive version
3. change the UI
Take a look at this chart for more confusion.
It's possible that Office 2007 will be the greatest product ever known to man, but I can't find a single compelling reason to pay for an upgrade. In fact, many businesses want to take features out of these applications as daft users and insecure applications=total IT and business meltdown.
Literally the only MS product that I use on an even remotely regular basis is Office on the Mac. This is primarily because the replacements are not quite there yet, but they are getting much closer. NeoOffice is actually better than OO.org but still a little weird in terms of interface. For a while I was concerned that my documents would become corrupt or hit some kind of voodoo then realized that I was thinking that because it has happened so many times with MS docs. (Don't make me recount the story of my masters thesis getting corrupted between Mac and PC versions of Word. Suffice to say that my Ned Flanders-like swearing on Sansome Street was a diddly.)
Office 2007 represents a huge opportunity for an open source Office replacement to stick MS where it hurts--in the wallet. Enough with social networking, can't someone do this already?
MS Office generates ~$11 billion in revenue for Microsoft and dominates the market. Its a tough market but a huge opportunity.
Previously:
Let's go build a great Open Source MS Office replacement
MS Office and open source office productivity apps
My 15 seconds of OpenOffice (in)fam(e/y)
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 29, 2006 07:40 PM
June 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Thanks to SCO for making Linux famous (now go away)
Now that the judge has thrown out virtually all of SCOs complaints against IBM's usage of Linux we should take a step back and thank SCO. If it weren't for the utter stupidity associated with the SCO vs. the World lawsuits, odds are Linux wouldn't be the news subject that it is. The SCO lawsuits are arguably the best marketing that Linux could have ever received. And since IBM already has a cadre of lawyers, let's call it break-even, if not in fact free press.
Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole.
Kudos to Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells of the United States District Court in Utah for a very detailed judgement and some well earned snarky comments in the order.
Links:
Open Source Smack-Down
Wells Grants in Part IBM's Motion to Limit SCO's Claims! In *Large* Part.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 29, 2006 07:20 PM
June 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Martin Musierowicz and I were looking for a place to eat last night in London, and Sebastian (a helpful sales clerk at Marks and Spencer) sent us to the Roof Gardens off of High Street Kensington. It's apparently a celebrity hangout, with paparazzi hanging around outside and bodyguards to keep the riffraff (like us) out. The week before we were there, a Wimbledon party was in full-force - Claudia Schiffer had been sitting in my chair.
Very hip.
Unfortunately, we are not (hip, that is). (Well, I'm not, anyway. How hip can you be with four children and a minivan?) I apologized to the server that I was not Tom Cruise or someone special. She took it in good stride. For the time we were in the restaurant, however, with the technobeat drowning out any attempt at meaningful conversation, I suppose those outside the restaurant thought we, the denizens of the hipness temple, were hip. I probably could have donned some oversized sunglasses like Beckham's wife and pretended to be famous on the way out.
My 15 seconds of hipness.
In the business world, it's possible to pretend at "hipness." The Web 2.0 world certainly has a lot of cachet at present, as does open source. But the only way to remain perma-hip is to actually sell things. Lots of things. Perpetually. The minute you don't, you're history.
With this in mind, my primary goal at Alfresco is not to make friends (downloads) or good PR. It is to make sales. That is the work ethic that made Red Hat what it is today - sometimes disliked and unhip because it was prickly to work with, but always successful in the way that corporations are measured: money. (This is a very poor way to measure people, but the very best way to measure companies. At least, the primary measurement.)
Posted by Matt Asay on June 29, 2006 01:30 AM
June 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
A time for Europe - Open source
As mentioned in this CNET article, Tuesday at OSBC London I opened the conference with a suggestion: Europe, the birthplace and cradle of the open source revolution, needs to reassert itself as the center of the open source phenomenon. Linux, MySQL, JBoss (Well, Marc is French with influences of Spain in him... :-), Trolltech, etc. These early open source leaders all came out of Europe.
As open source has commercially matured, however, the United States has taken over. Silicon Valley has funded the next round of open source, and we're not necessarily the better for it. There is an ethos in the projects and startups that emerged from the social democracies of Europe that one doesn't necessarily find in the capitalism-spawned companies.
Let's be clear: I am an unabashed open source capitalist. I live in the US and think the world of many of the rising open source leaders that make their home with me there. But I also have a sense of history, and history points to Europe as the birthplace of most successful open source companies, as well as the headquarters for the most active and successful open source VC, Danny Rimer (Index Ventures) (One of Business 2.0's "50 People Who Matter").
The United States will continue to churn out exceptional open source projects and companies. Fine. But that's no reason for Europe to relocate to Silicon Valley and abandon its former leadership. (Even the successful open source companies in the US - virtually every single one of them - were born outside Silicon Valley, like Red Hat, Digium/Asterisk, etc.) It's time for VCs to stop insisting that their portfolio companies relocate to the Valley. Aside from MySQL, that serves the Web 2.0 market, few companies - open source or proprietary - will find their customers in the Valley, so why move to Vendor Land?
It's time for European open source startups to leverage the rise of open source within their government organizations. And it's time for Europe's SIs to assist in the matter by not treating open source as a matter of cost (free), but rather one of code freedom.
In short, it's time for Europe to regain its pride of place in the open source pecking order. There is something about the European mindset that lends itself well to open source software. There's no reason to capitulate on this, and every reason to exult in it and build many new and exciting open source commercial enterprises.
Please?
Posted by Matt Asay on June 28, 2006 11:25 PM
June 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Windows as the new high performance OS?
I spent some time yesterday with Nick McGrath, Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft. Nick and I first met at LinuxWorld UK a year or two ago - we were on a panel together. I appreciated Nick's candor then, and was very glad to meet him again at OSBC London.
Nick mentioned something to me that came as a complete shock: Windows HPC. I did some consulting for Linux Networx 2-3 years ago, and got to know the HPC (High performance computing) market reasonably well. When you think "HPC," you should think of supercomputing clusters at national laboratories, number crunching clusters doing portfolio optimization at large financial institutions, and oil and gas companies looking for ways to fill those trendy Prius hybrids. This is not wimpy computing. It's the most demanding computing anyone does, anywhere. Microsoft has set up a High Performance Computing Centre at Southhampton University to help build out the product. (It's being developed in the UK.)
All of which makes it very interesting that Windows is now playing in this market. Whatever your views on Windows - Blue Screen of Death and what-not - no one runs crash-prone software in HPC environments. If Microsoft proves itself here, it should be able to effectively shelve its history of crash-prone software. In addition, the work it does in HPC should trickle down to the desktop, making the software run faster, with fewer crashes. (XP has largely solved that issue, anyway.) The one thing HPC won't necessarily help Microsoft with is security - performance is king in HPC, not necessarily security.
This is an area that everyone in the Linux community should watch closely. If Microsoft pulls this off, it will be very telling for the company's quality and strategy going forward. You can't fool a national laboratory with good marketing - these guys are marketing immune. They just want the best system, and pay top dollar for it. If Microsoft can convince them, there's something real in the product.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 28, 2006 02:16 AM
June 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Steve Howe (DrKW) and the difficulties of enterprise-driven open source
Steve Howe had one of the most unfortunately named sessions of OSBC London - "Openadaptor - Efficient System Integration and Migration" - and one of the most interesting. Steve is Global Head of Open Source Initiatives for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a Europe-based investment bank.
The company started its Openadaptor project to "provide an easy and standard way to allow DrKW to interact with a standard message bus." Innocuous enough. The purpose was to "stop the needless duplication of effort that would otherwise have ensued." Again, vanilla. The company wanted to coordinate and leverage a community - including its competitors - to offload support costs and improve development.
Did the dream become reality?
Not really, Steve said. He noted that DrKW received a lot of advice and contributions from outside the company, but not necessarily a community. As Steve said, "we made some good friends," but that's it. Why? Steve suggested it's because the "itch" they were scratching was probably fairly well-localized to DrKW - it wasn't a huge need that lots of people felt.
[UPDATE: Steve corrects me in the comments below: "One slight correction though - I didn't feel the itch was specific to DrKW, but rather to complex organisations with many systems and the need for middleware. ie the itch was smaller than 'I need an operating system that doesn't crash every 5 minutes'."]
Was it a mistake, in Steve's mind? No. But it required a lot more work than expected, because it's very difficult to get outside contributions. Marc Fleury addressed this in his opening remarks, as well. Those who take a "If I built it, they will come" attitude are going to fail. Completely. They won't come. Not without a lot of work.
Some of Steve's conclusions, based on the Openadaptor experience:
- Community development of software is possible at the lower end of the stack as there are fewer design choices to be made.
- At an even slightly more complex level such as openadaptor it becomes much more difficult to develop communally.
- Highly complex applications will never be able to be developed communually as there is too much scope for religious differences of opinion. [Asay: This is a different riff on a theme r0ml raised at OSCON 2003 and reprised at OSBC 2004 ("(More) Missing Open Source Projects").]
- There is scope for open source business software, but the development model will need to be different to that of traditional open source.
- Finally, remember the key differentiator between open source and proprietary software is quality, not cost. It is important not to lose support for open source as a whole by overselling what is possible today.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 28, 2006 01:52 AM
June 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Marc Fleury @ JBoss (The JiHat continues)
Marc Fleury is giving the opening remarks at today's OSBC London, and is talking about the rise of open source. As Marc said, it's no longer a question of "Why?", but rather of "How?" with regard to open source. Open source is not going away - it's only going to thrive and dominate.
A few interesting points:
- Debt to IBM. He talked a bit about the debt we owe to IBM for getting open source started with its $1 billion commitment to Linux, but noted that IBM seems conflicted now on that initial support for open source. It has a range of software businesses that compete with open source, rather than leverage it, in his words. True enough. In a company the size of IBM, you never get a single, consistent vision.
- Bottom-up and top-down phenomenon: the system administrators are driving adoption from the "bottom," whereas CIOs are pushing for adoption from the top down.
- Customers need to understand that open source is a viable business model. It's not about "peace, love, and software falling from the sky," but rather about sustainable profit.
- Three empirically proven open source business models: "Pure" support play. (Examples: Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco) "Protective"/dual-licensing. (Examples: MySQL, Sleepycat) "On-ramp" model. Start with a free/open product, and pay for proprietary extensions. (Examples: IBM, SugarCRM)
- Customers need to understand the solidity of open source development models. You need a "professionalized core" of development. (See my comments here.) This is an optimized factory - you leverage community involvement, but you take responsibility for core development.
- JBoss develops/acquires code in four ways: 1) Self-developed, 2) Acquire other open source projects, 3) IT buyer-generated innovations, and 4) JBoss third-party developer creations.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 28, 2006 01:34 AM
June 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Frustrated by Web 2.0's lack of multi-site integration
I assume that if you read this blog then you spend a fair amount of your life online. Sadly some of us spend all our time connected to some screen, be it monitor, Crackberry, Treo or Tv. As such, I am always looking for ways to better manage my information and share things with my cohorts. Today I came to the realization that there is no simple way to manage all of your disparate stuff in one centralized manner. Nor is there a way to then collaborate with your cohorts on all of these things (wikis simply are not great for to-do lists.) I need to go beyond MyYahoo and get to MyDave where I have my vast array of crap centralized.
Case in point. I refuse to use Windows unless absolutely necessary. I came to the realization for the hundredth time that there are not many business viable unified email/PIM/calendar apps except Outlook (Lotus sucks, Novell is pointless) or Evolution on Linux (a little crashy for business users and then forces OpenOffice.org) Really, Outlook is what is maintaining Microsoft's stranglehold on the corporate desktop. On the Mac I use the not-really-well-integrated iCal, Address Book and Apple mail pretty much exclusively. It's not a great setup but it's usable. It's the browser-based applications that are killing me now. I have been a long-time user of both MyYahoo and Gmail and in bouts of self-flagellation am on and off with RSS readers...RSS is annoying to me in that I want to interact with the data as I do with sites like Backpack. Adding to the pain, today we decided to re-introduce Basecamp into the mix.
If you haven't seen any of the 37 Signals stuff, it's great. Easy to use, well-designed etc. But even they don't offer a completely integrated suite of all of their own apps. I need Basecamp integrated with MyYahoo and Salesforce.com to really be productive. I want all my stuff on one page at one URL, in sync across multiple computers and visible on my handheld. This was the promise of portals but it remains unfulfilled. It was actually my visit to Zimbra and their unbelievably well integrated application that made me so frustrated that this problem isn't being better addressed across the major players.
To me the big opportunity of Web 2.0 development is the ability to create a better user experience based on features etc. Instead we are ending up with a morass of social-networking, photo-sharing redundancy. And while much of this stuff is cool and potentially usable, it's not enough.
Dear Web 2.0 companies,
Please make us all more productive.
XOXO
-dave
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 27, 2006 09:36 PM
June 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source community subversion as marketing ploy
The launch of Microsoft's Codeplex "shared source" site is merely the latest attempt to undermine and usurp the open source community via clever marketing.
There are two main reasons proprietary vendors are threatened by open source alternatives: price compression and loss of market share.
Open source companies have a pricing umbrella in relation to proprietary vendors license fees. Proprietary vendors argue that open source alternatives lack features, are less secure, socialist and so on, but fundamentally the difference in features is likely no more than 20%. Open source products are generally 10-30% of the cost of the proprietary competitor. This means you can pay roughly 20% of the cost and receive roughly 80% of the features. This is a very appealing proposition. And the more companies who take advantage of this fact the more market share is lost by proprietary vendors.
We are seeing more enterprises shifting parts of their infrastructure to open source software. Evans Data Corp. says that 60% of all U.S. developers touch open source components. As more enterprises shift toward open source proprietary vendors will share market share and margins shrink. Proprietary vendors will do anything they can to protect themselves from forces that disrupt their position
Discerning the methods that undermine open source growth are as important as identifying what tactics lead to further adoption. In the last few years we've really only seen two major software vendors come out strongly against open source: Microsoft and SAP. Each had taken different paths up until recently where now it seems the anti-OSS strategies are beginning to converge.
First lets look at the strategies we have seen to date from Microsoft and SAP.
Microsoft Strategy: Discredit the alternative
Microsoft launched its "Get the Facts" campai(g)n in 2004 with the goal of educating IT buyers on exactly why they should not buy Linux. And since IT buyers shouldn't use Linux they should clearly buy Windows. It was groundbreaking in that it showed that Microsoft was truly threatened, but somewhat bizarre in its implementation, replete with unsubstantiated data and quotes from notorious Redmond-loving analysts. Still though, it was effective. It brought Linux front and center to a broad audience that might never have learned just how great it is.SAP Strategy: Trust us, we know what's best for you
SAP has taken a different anti-open source path. Instead of print and online ads, executives have made statements that allude to the fact that open source tends to be too amateurish for use in enterprises. The basic goal is to ensure that existing customers remain locked into SAP's expensive offerings and that these customers won't be tempted by the not-ready-for-prime-time open source alternatives.
While both companies will likely continue with these strategies a new iteration is emerging. It’s a game plan that relies on end-user customers as the spokespeople to discredit open source.
Anti-OSS Strategy Convergence: Locked-in customers discrediting open sourceAn odd twist is that both companies have started to embrace certain aspects of open source. Microsoft has opened the doors to its Linux labs and started a "shared source" office to collaborate with developers outside of the company. SAP made an investment in MySQL and opened an open source office of its own to manage community relationships. And while I have no doubt that respective program leaders have the best intentions in their "embrace" of open source we must remain somewhat wary. But, is there an ulterior motive?
Both SAP and Microsoft have begun providing sources to editors that will insist that open source is: hacker fodder, not reliable, buggy or less secure depending on the theme they are trying to push and maybe the cycle of the moon. (I can't come up with any other reason behind this near random rhetoric so I assume some kind of Wolfman type scenario.)
Anti-OSS Strategy Convergence: Subverting the community
Consider the fact that Microsoft sponsors open source events, has a team dedicated to Linux, and has kindler, gentler (and smarter) staff that engage with the open source communityThis is a smart strategy on many levels, not the least of which is the pseudo-friendly approach to open source developers and pundits. One could argue that much of the press and marketing related to open source comes from vendors like Microsoft who have chosen to antagonize. This strategy of getting along starts to diminish the zealousness of both sides. As Chinese Military Strategist Sun-Tzu said back in ~400 BC "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."
Marketing takes on many forms. The open source model has allowed for companies and projects to grow rapidly with minimal marketing dollars. As the open source movement matures and big companies fall behind we will see marketing rhetoric and spending increase. Any outreach attempts from vendors who have worked for years to destroy open source should be taken with a grain of salt and a sharp eye cast on motivating factors.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 27, 2006 01:41 PM
June 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Watching the World Cup this year (and yes, I've watched many of the matches - last night's Switzerland vs. Ukraine match took years from my life - it was the essence of boredom), I've been reminded at how differently teams can play the same game. England with its obnoxious long balls into Peter Crouch. France with...well, so far, with nothing. Argentina with its flair and momentum.
Italy, however, takes "difference" to a new level. From today's The Times:
Italy’s method is rooted in pessimism. Ask an Italian whether the glass is half-full or half-empty and he is liable to reply that it is poisoned. Ask an Australian and he will ask if it is a free bar.The Italian I know best - Fabrizio - is no pessimist (He's taking on one of the most interesting and sexy markets on the planet), but the football/soccer he watches certainly is: Italian soccer is dull to watch. (Sure, not everyone can play like Arsenal, but that's no reason to abandon all hope to Italian football. :-) Heavily defensive with sporadic counterattacks.
Another aspect of Italian football is the incessant, over-the-top playacting. From The Guardian's The Fiver email update:
Since the merest whiff of contact will cause Italians to hurl themselves to the ground claiming to have been brutally fouled, you might as well brutally foul them. Constantly.All my quips about Italian football aside, they're winning.
Winning matters.
In open source, different projects and companies operate in very different ways, despite the similar "game" we're all playing. SugarCRM has its tiered product model. Alfresco and Red Hat have a certified binary model. MySQL and the-company-formerly-known-as-Sleepycat have a dual license model.
The differences go beyond licensing models, however. Different companies have different deal sizes, different sales models, different communities. And as closed, proprietary companies increasingly seek to partner with open source companies, we'll need to support the added complexity of all the different models associated with these companies. Heterogenaiety is good.
I hope that as we work to provide clear messaging to the market about why open source matters, and how to maximize value from it, we won't forget that differences are good thing in software, just as they are in soccer/football. This is our strength.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 27, 2006 02:55 AM
June 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Simon Phipps on "The Zen of Free" (OSBC London)
Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer for Sun Microsystems, is keynoting today's OSBC London, which has turned out quite well. (I didn't know what to expect from this show, given that I didn't organize it or do the heavy-lifting on the content. Informa has done a fantastic job. Glad to see I'm irrelevant.) He's addressing the topic of different open source business models.
He said a few things I found important and interesting.
- Open source gives you a way to "hire" developers without actually hiring them. Not because you don't want to hire them, but because you can't hire them, because they don't want to work for you (or whatever). You leverage the self-interested motives of these developers by tapping into their development projects.
- Synchronized self-interest. Related to the above, open source doesn't work because it's selfless and loving. It works because it's an increasingly efficient free market. The genius of open source is that it is "connected capitalism" (as Simon said).
- Software (Market) 3.0. The software is already "just there." You assemble/select it as needed. You pay for software at time of value (when needed). Simon argues that we need to shift away from a "right to use" model in software, and toward a value model - targeted "bundles of value" to specific vertical market segments.
- "In the world of open source software, everything is free to someone, and nothing is free to everyone." This seems like an astute observation to me. I may have a customer that needs to buy support, but doesn't need help with implementing. Everyone, somewhere, will pay. They may not pay me, but they will pay someone.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 27, 2006 02:34 AM
June 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Red Hat partner ecosystem: Happy but not overjoyed?
Forbes recently ran an article on Red Hat's prospects, as viewed by its partners. A few key findings emerged from the 130-partner survey:
- Most [partners] were upbeat and expected their Red Hat business to grow by more than 31% in the 2006 calendar year, lower than Banc of America's own revenue growth estimate of 35%. [Asay note: Red Hat has become a key partner of Alfresco and other open source applications companies....I wonder if our collective growth estimates would exceed 35%? I expect they might.]
- Red Hat's partners are excited but still ignorant about the JBoss acquisition. The company is going to need to invest in partner education to help explain the rationale and product strategy going forward.
- 35% of the survey respondents said [that pricing pressure] was the greatest risk to Red Hat's revenue stream. More than 50% of them said pricing for Red Hat's enterprise version of Linux, REHL, had to come down or face pressure from customers later on.
Also, this price pressure may mean that Red Hat's initial pricing is probably on par or perhaps even higher than proprietary vendors'. Is this a good thing? Of course it is, because it would mean that Red Hat has managed to move the conversation out of "Open source is nice because it's cheap" land and into "Open source is great because it's more robust, faster, more secure, etc. And you should be happy to pay for that quality."
After that first year (or two), customers are demanding even more from Red Hat. If Red Hat has shown anything, it's that the company knows how to deliver value. Red Hat can handle it.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 26, 2006 02:03 PM
June 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
MySQL: The database maverick on the rise
Jason Maynard of Credit Suisse First Boston, enfant terrible of the software analyst community (well, if you're a proprietary vendor, anyway), is at it again. He's got a great "Mavericks vs. Microsoft" series going, with a June 23, 2006 report coming from a call with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL. He makes some interesting points, including:
- Currently a private company, MySQL is...the world's most popular open source database with more than 8 million active installations.
- The primary revenue stream for the company comes from the conversion of free downloads of its database product into support contracts. So far, the conversion rate to paying customers runs about 1 for every 1,000 downloads. MySQL’s database has been downloaded close to 100M times since it was released. To date, only about 100,000 downloads have resulted in a paying service and support contract, leaving a relatively large potential opportunity for the company. We think the company can achieve a better download to paying customer ratio as the functionality and support offerings improve over time. In addition to the revenue stream coming from support contracts, the company sells an embedded license to those customers who embed the MySQL database in its own products. This second revenue stream is much smaller than subscription revenues. [Asay note: This is surprising, as I had heard (I thought from the company itself) that OEM revenues were close to 60% of total revenues. Need to check on this.]
- MySQL has grown sales over 100% a year for the last 5 years.
- The company is not focusing on competing directly with vendors like Oracle and IBM. Instead, MySQL is deriving growth from the rapidly expanding number of Web applications and Web 2.0 online businesses. The company centers its development and sales efforts on these emerging segments because they are more cost sensitive and have unique requirements around ease of use and simplicity.
- According to Gartner and IDC, the database market...totaled about $14B in 2005. The market is dominated by the three primary infrastructure vendors, Oracle with about 48% market share, Microsoft with 15% share for its SQL Server product, and IBM’s DB2 with 22% share. Over the last year Linux database servers and Microsoft’s SQL Server had the strongest momentum, according to Gartner. The three largest vendors, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM, have a substantial installed base in existing ERP applications and transactional business applications from which they derive a significant amount of maintenance and support revenue. In our opinion, Oracle is gaining share at the high end of the market from IBM while Microsoft and upstarts like MySQL are fighting it out in a number of lower end segments.
- MySQL’s emergence as a new player in the database market is significant because its focus, ease of use, and business model has enabled it to tap into an underserved market. We think MySQL, and the LAMP stack in general, are building a presence as a viable solution for rapid deployment, and as a result are emerging as a roadblock to Microsoft’s enterprise ambitions.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 26, 2006 01:35 PM
June 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
As I browsed the news this morning I noticed that ActiveGrid's new release will run on both LAMP and J2EE deployments. I asked CEO Peter Yared to give us an update.
A few months ago, I posted an open letter to Jonathan Schwartz, then President and COO of Sun, asking him to open source Java so that the JVM would attract the PHP, Python, and Perl open source communities and bring the Java and LAMP worlds together with a single VM.Sun announced at JavaOne last month that they would open source Java. While no one is quite sure what the license will be, we at ActiveGrid have taken this to heart and have started contributing to the Jython project, mainly by updating Jython to Python 2.3 (from Python 2.1, where it had been languishing ever since Microsoft hired Jim Hugunin to make Python run better on the .net CLR).
With ActiveGrid Studio v2 and ActiveGrid Server v2, our LAMP-based technology will run within a Java server. All of our customers have found it incredibly easy to build new, Web 2.0 style applications that integrate with their enterprise backends, but have found it challening to get new server technologies approved within their IT deployment organizations.
We are excited that Java is joining the open source community and to contribute towards making Java a better home for dynamic languages.
Previously:
Sun's Open Source Strategy still MIA-An open letter to Jonathan Schwartz
Sun vs. Scripting Languages
Marketing to Dilbert: Mini-analysis of Sun
Sun coming out of death spiral-McNealy moving on?
Front End Integration-Lightweight Architecture Part 3
Enterprise SOA Apps Take Off on Lightweight Architecture
Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! point enterprise developers towards "lightweight" architecture
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 26, 2006 10:23 AM
June 23, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Beating proprietary on open source's terms
The Wall Street Journal ran one of the interesting articles I've read in a long, long time. About Applebees, the United States' 9th largest restaurant chain. I hadn't thought much about Applebees until I read this - it's not my kind of place.
But it's apparently perfect for a huge swath of Middle America:
The Friday night crowd at the Applebee's in Hays, Kan., is so robust that nearly a dozen parties are waiting outside for tables. There are families, old folks, and young singles like Anne Speier and Rhonda Eckler, who're downing cocktails at a table near the window. "We just got paid and wanted to splurge a little bit," says the 25-year-old Ms. Speier.Think about this in the context of software. If you're a startup, you can compete against the BigCos by doing what they do better (and lose most of the time, because it's just too much of a pain to buy from a new vendor), or you can compete by doing what the BigCos do differently. Or, rather, selling/distributing/developing in some fundamentally different way.Choosing Applebee's is easy in a place where there's little other choice. There is no Chili's. No Houlihan's. Not even a Bennigan's. In this community of roughly 21,000, Applebee's is the only brand-name casual dining restaurant.
The scene in Hays helps explain why Applebee's International Inc. is the star of the $440 billion restaurant industry. While competitors battle for space in the parking lots of suburban shopping malls, the Overland Park, Kan., chain is entering rural markets that never before boasted an upscale restaurant -- or at least one that passes for upscale hereabouts.
The rural-market strategy is part of Applebee's larger effort to be America's restaurant. Its roughly 1,600 units, the majority owned by franchisees, already make it the undisputed king of the industry's fastest-growing segment, casual dining. But Applebee's wants more. It wants its red-apple logo to be as recognized as the golden arches of McDonald's Corp. It wants to be the nation's most profitable restaurant chain....
Meanwhile, Applebee's is becoming something in small towns that it never did in large suburbs: a vital cog in the community. Applebee's managers are viewed as leaders in many small towns, often welcomed with a picture on the local newspaper's front page. The restaurants become places where high school seniors take post-prom dates. Garden clubs meet there, too. "Applebee's becomes a cultural piece of the community, and so this has been a wonderful strategy," says Mr. Lumpkin.
Applebees could go out and fight head-to-head with Chilis, etc., and it does. Applebees competes in the metropolitan markets with all of the big chains. Even here, however, the company does it differently, Fast Company reports: they concentrate restaurants in these areas, rather than spreading them out, not fretting about cutting into each other's territory.
But the growth Applebees is experiencing is due to its rural strategy. It's going where it's competitors aren't. It's creating restaurant markets which had been without. And it's raking in the cash as a result.
Open source companies shouldn't waste time with RFPs. They shouldn't over-invest in a direct field sales force. They should bring value back to support (it's considered a necessary evil in most software companies - for open source companies, it's lifeblood). Etc.
Be different. Win by fighting open source's battle. Not the proprietary vendors'.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 23, 2006 02:20 PM
June 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Via ZDNet.com: Novell's board of directors named Ron Hovsepian CEO and president to replace Jack Messman, and ousted the company's chief financial officer.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 22, 2006 07:27 AM
June 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
I constantly try to gauge what the generic strategies are for open source companies. Are the products competing on price or feature differentiation? The reason I am such a believer in open source software is because the development and distribution models allow for both. Essentially, open source allows you to not only be less expensive than proprietary vendors but have features that are better. The new version of Zimbra is a great example of this open source continuum. It's more innovative and better engineered than the competition but remains less expensive to buy and manage.
You may have already seen Zimbra's ultra-slick AJAX based email client but the server itself is really what matters. The UI is merely the transport for all of the cool features. But for the moment to get all the slick stuff you need to use the browser. CEO Satish Dharmaraj said that customers were giving feedback saying "don’t give us this experience and then take it away when I get on a plane. Since the user experience mismatch was/is too jarring they have started working on a client-side solution. The plan is to take everything that’s in the product today and take the experience offline by creating a service that runs locally on your PC and does server-to-server sync on the back-end. The goal is present the same experience as you see online with Zimbra, but done via a small footprint. Meanwhile you can still use Outlook or whatever email/PIM/calendar client you desire.
Zimbra will soon be launching a Zimlet Marketplace Directory (a Zimlet is connector from the Zimbra server to another website or service) that will allow developers and customers who are writing Zimlets to donate them back and/try to get generate revenue ala Salesforce.com AppExchange. Things like SMS, traffic reports and Evite are all natively designed into the server. These Zimlets are very cool but there is probably some level of learning curve for users to really take advantage of them.
Speaking of Salesforce, the beta of Zimbra 4.0 will be out over the next couple of weeks and includes some very cool integration with Salesforce.com including the ability to drag and drop emails, contacts etc into the Salesforce.com. It’s actually far slicker than any of the Outlook integration tools I have seen.
The Zimbra 4.0 beta release also includes a new application, Zimbra Documents which includes Wiki functionality based on ALE which allows you to embed things like spreadsheets into your document.
I think it's a very cool product and I would absolutely kill for a integrated email/PIM/calendar solution for the Mac. They sell direct for companies needing 500 seats or more but there are plenty of partners and channels to buy from.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 21, 2006 08:46 PM
June 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Levanta--the comeback kid of Linux?
I have written about Levanta before, both in relation to their technology and the story of the decline of LinuxCare. Clearly Sarah Lacy is taking her editorial cues from us with a great piece on the rebirth of Levanta. Personally I would have gone with some kind of zombie angle on LinuxCare's resistance to death.
Fresh off VA's December, 1999 IPO-which set a record for the biggest one-day pop, shooting up nearly 700%-Linuxcare filed to go public in January, 2000, despite some $20 million in annual losses. But it was a little too late. By the spring of that year it had pulled its offering amid a softening market and the abrupt resignation of its Chief Executive Fernand Sarrat and Chief Financial Officer Doug Nassaur.That's where most people stopped hearing about Linuxcare, but the company didn't go under. Now it's back, renamed Levanta in 2004, and positioning itself as a Linux system administrator's best friend. And, in a sign that Levanta has returned to the land of the living, BusinessWeek.com has learned that the company is announcing a new round of venture capital of between $13 million and $15 million in the coming weeks that management expects will bring it back to profitability. That's almost triple the average size deal for an open-source company these days.
Previously:
Advice for Open Source Startups: Remember LinuxCare
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 21, 2006 10:21 AM
June 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open source development: Saving while spending
I was on a customer call with Kevin Cochrane today and a customer prospect. The prospect wanted to know how big Alfresco's development staff is, which we were happy to tell him (open source companies tend not to keep silly secrets): 15. (Not everyone is on the site, for some reason, both developers and non-developers, but whatever.)
"15? Isn't that small?"
Kevin's answer was classic. In his experience at Interwoven (similar to mine at Lineo and even Novell), the vast majority of "developers" within a company are not core developers at all. They're people writing drivers, doing QA, etc. In an open source company (just as in an open source project), the core development team tends not to scale well beyond 15-25 people. As noted in the link above for open source projects, the vast amount of code production (83% in terms of Linux, Apache, etc.) is done by ~15 people. Very few.
One of the exciting things about an open source company is that you take advantage of highly leveraged development, where the drivers, localization, etc. is done by the community, not your core development team. This means open source companies can spend proportionately less on development while simultaneously investing a lot more in core development.
Net result for the customer: better products, both because the core development team is innovating faster, better, longer, and the "peripheral" development is managed by a development community that reflects the diversity of an industry's requirements. So, no one at Alfresco speaks Italian, but we have great Italian language support because our partners and customers speak Italian. Ditto for Japanese, Brazilian Portugese, etc. Our community shapes Alfresco in its image, while we focus on the core Alfresco platform. Everyone wins.
Except our competitors, of course. Or SugarCRM's. Or Red Hat's. Etc. Their competitors lose. They just can't keep up with lower sales and marketing costs 1, coupled with lower development costs (and higher development investments). Yes, it's unfair. But the proprietary vendors will get over it. Or they'll come work for us. :-)
1 NOTE: See the link for more information on open source sales and marketing costs. One thing I don't talk about in the other entry, however, is that open source sales teams necessary to close a deal - even large deals - tend to be much smaller than in the proprietary world. So, sales costs truly are smaller, even over time.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 20, 2006 04:04 PM
June 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
AMQ and Open Development at Big Banks
A month or so ago a meme was going around questioning whether big companies, namely those in financial services were "giving back" to the open source community. And while there are many angles to this case the underlying fact is that most large IT organizations are developing and managing their own software applications as consumer of open source and Linux, not as developers.
But, with the launch of AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) we see a technology standard developed at JP Morgan released into the community. This disproves the theory that banks aren't giving back and in fact proves that open source and standards development is taking place in organizations large and small.
AMQP will help to reduce license fees associated with MQ Series and the ilk. In what I would call a typical proprietary response to the threat from open source, Hub Vandervoort, vice president of strategic services at Bedford, Mass-based Sonic Software, said the idea of an open-source message queuing technology "is interesting to some, but open source doesn't have continuous availability, clustering, etc." Seems that Sonic is stuck in some kind of time warp...most open source projects have had these features for a while. In fact much of the competition to Sonic do so now or will in the near future.
On the positive side, it means yet another market ready to be leveled by open source. Go download Mule and build your messaging backbone on open standards.
Link: Open-Source Message Queuing Protocol Set for Launch
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 19, 2006 07:30 PM
June 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Enterprise software vendors: Talking the open source talk
I'm growing a wee bit impatient with the major enterprise ISVs and their alleged support of open source. Oracle has been out in front of they "we love open source" hype, yet the company continually underwhelms on delivery. Last week the company announced "content management for the masses," with accompanying quotes from OpenText calling it a "watershed event." (I think OpenText's chairman needs to review the definition of "watershed event" so that he doesn't persist in misusing it.)
So what do we have in this Big New Exciting Product? A feature-weak, closed source, closed standards CMS. It doesn't even support JSR-170, the minimal baseline for standards in the space, and is egregiously limited in how one gets content into our out of the system. It appears to allow users to have a file, a folder, and have policies one sets on folders. That's it. It would be hard to find many other ECM systems as minimally functional as this.
But Oracle will undoubtedly improve this with time. No, the big slam against the product is its inexplicable lack of support for basic industry standards. OpenText's chairman heralds Oracle's entry into the market because "ECM players such as Open Text have been waiting for systems companies such as Oracle to provide base-level content management so that they can focus on higher level functionality." Guess what, Mr. OpenText: in a commodity market, no one builds on non-commodity foundations. Oracle is giving you (and the "masses," which truly will need to be "asses" to buy into this lock-in) a one-way trip into Oracle databases, from which it will be expensive and time-consuming to get out.
Oracle, of course, is not alone in this, and it's not just an ECM thing. Across the board, we hear from the ERP, CRM, office productivity, operating system, etc. markets that they're getting religion on open source. Yet the big vendors keep piling proprietary, closed-standards products on the market. They talk the talk, but refuse to walk the walk.
If you're an enterprise IT buyer, you need to keep in mind that every time you buy into a proprietary ERP system, or whatever, you are ceding control of your IT to your vendor. You are giving them control over your employees, your data, your productivity. You are allowing a supplier to control your company.
Lest you think this hyperbole, go ahead and get a quotation on what it will cost you to move from Documentum's ECM, or Siebel's CRM, o SAP's ERP. Once you stop crying, start planning ways to build on open platforms in the future.
In our day, there is no compelling reason to lock oneself into closed source and closed standards. There are compelling alternatives to the enterprise vendors in virtually every product category. You owe it to yourself to be master of your own IT fate, given that IT increasingly provides the backbone and heartbeat of an organization.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 18, 2006 09:20 AM
June 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Google...innovative?!? Come on!
I don't understand the Google fetish. BusinessWeek certainly has it. Its latest issue has a cover story called "Champions of Innovation," and Marissa Mayer of Google on the cover.
Why? What has Ms. Mayer, or Google, done (lately) the is even remotely innovative?
Yes, Google search is awesome. But so it was years ago. I would have thought BW would focus on current innovation, not 5-10-year old innovation. (Besides, Google's primary innovation is its original insight that ads marry well with searches. Its search is great, but not necessarily much better than Yahoo's or MSN's.
Can you name any other Google innovations? Before you sputter out "Calendars! Email! Spreadsheets!!!", let me remind you of the definition of innovation:
1: a creation (a new device or process) resulting from study and experimentation [syn: invention] 2: the creation of something in the mind [syn: invention, excogitation, conception, design] 3: the act of starting something for the first time; introducing something new (Source: Princeton Dictionary)So, let's run through the Hot New Products that Google has introduced in the past few years, and give them grades on innovation (and utility and polish, while we're at it):
- Search. It wasn't the first, but it's clearly the best. A+
- Orkut (Social Networking) - F (Was there every any need for this? Did anyone ever use it?)
- Picasa (Photo sharing) - D (Acquired, not developed in-house. Tired retread of Flickr, which is better)
- Froogle (Comparison shopping) - F- (Possibly the best idea and worst delivery of anything new Google has done. But it stinks)
- Spreadsheets (Um, spreadsheet) - D (Didn't Microsoft do this much better decades ago? So now it's on the web...who cares? It's not nearly as good as Excel. Certainly nothing innovative about it.)
- Calendar (PIM) - C (A decent product, but not innovative)
- Google Earth - A (Not very useful, but very cool. For about 20 minutes, and then it's time to get back to work and the real world again)
- Google Maps - A- (Pretty cool. Moderately innovative in the ability to scroll maps. But that's really the only innovation.)
- Google Mobile (Text) - C (I love texting Google for answers, but it's hardly innovative. Others have been doing a better job of it for years.)
- Google Hubris - A++
Don't get me wrong. I think Google is a great company for what it does well: search. I think it's abysmal at just about everything else. I certainly don't think it belongs on the cover of a BusinessWeek edition highlighting the world's most innovative companies. Like Microsoft, it has done one thing well and will spend at least a decade milking it. Unlike Microsoft, however, it has only done one thing well (search). Microsoft has both Windows and Office for which it can take credit. Google needs to come up with something else.
Perhaps, like Microsoft, it will find that some innovation doesn't come from Stanford PhDs. Because, at its core, the best innovation solves human needs, and not many humans are engineers. It may be time for Google to start "scratching" a wider variety of "itches."
Posted by Matt Asay on June 17, 2006 05:56 PM
June 16, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source and the Mobile Market (Guest post from Funambol)
Seems that the guys at open source mobile shop Funambol have been hearing my pain regarding mobile phones and data services. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco thinks there is a way out of cell phone hell.
Open Source and the Mobile Market We recently had the pleasure of hearing Dave rant about his mobile phone and BlackBerry death-spiral. Fortunately, he won't have to start rubbing sticks together to send out smoke signals any time soon - I promise.
RIM is starting to target the consumer space by inking deals with operators. The latest: Cingular in the U.S. In theory, this should make email easily integrated with cell phones... and RIM does have a pretty good email solution. Problem is, RIM's solution -- and their business model -- has depended on their proprietary hardware. They are stretching a device built just for the enterprise to adapt it to consumers. So far, only lowering the cost... That is not the way to do it. Consumers need a different type of device. Do you believe my father will ever use a QWERTY phone? I do not think so. However, he uses SMS today. And he receives emails on his desktop. One life, two separate worlds (mobile and web). I does not have to be that way. Good news: it is already changing.
How are RIM going to make their business work with all the phones from dozens of vendors in the consumer market? How do they extend functionality and interoperability to address this myriad of devices with proprietary software? They're smart enough to know that email is the killer app for mobile... reaching the mass market handsets (like your Razr) with email (or SmartSMS ;-) has nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with open source and open standards.
Open source software can do more for the mobile market than any other market it's disrupted to date. Why? Because there are 750 million phones in the world that are compatible with an open standard for PIM and, soon, mobile email (it is called SyncML). And because the only way to test all those phones (with the variations of software builds and network operators) is to harness the power of an open source community. The lousy customer service you were getting from the operators? Open source communities provide better support than that because of natural incentives for cooperation -- look how fast Linux fixes happen and the Linux device drivers history.
The trick is making sure operators "get" the idea of open source software as a real business value both on the cost and revenue side. It's not a religion or philosophy. We have some work to do but I know Dave can hang in there. Hold on -- we're nearly there. With open source and open standard your mobile life will change (and it will be finally integrated with your web life).
------------
Fabrizio Capobianco is CEO of Funambol. You can read his blog here.
UPDATE:
I switched a Verizon Razr, which is fantastic but battery life is weak, and a T-mobile 8700 Blackberry. All good for nearly a week!
Previously:
I am in a mobile phone death spiral
Comparison: Blackberry 8700c vs. Treo (Verdict: all carriers suck)
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 16, 2006 05:13 PM
June 16, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Krugle code search engine out of beta and into the world
The Krugle team stayed up all nite and released the 1.0 version of their online code/project/tech paper search engine. It's a very cool tool for developers who need a way to find code quickly and efficiently.
The system searches allow users to find and interactively browse source code files, tech pages to find code documentation, discussion forums and knowledge base information and projects to find relevant open source projects.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 16, 2006 04:28 PM
June 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
...garbage out. So goes the adage, and it's true. At no time was it more apparent to me than while watching England stumble to win against Trinidad and Tobago today.
Peter Crouch barely belongs in top-league football anywhere (even the MLS). He certainly doesn't belong as a starter on England's otherwise excellent team. One year ago, Crouch was limping along with relegation-prone Southampton, and some goofball suggested that he might be a "threat" due to his gangly, 6'7" height for the English National team. Shortly after that, he was made part of the England squad, and then Liverpool picked him up.
And so he has been a threat. To England's chances of winning. He managed to score today, but only after bungling at least two shots that should have been in.
In Crouch manner, some lame open source projects get promoted to the big time by IBM, Oracle, or whomever. A big vendor's support can't turn rubbish into quality, just as Crouch has not improved much by the increased exposure and playing time he's had at the highest levels. Instead, he just exposes his fallibilities the more he plays. Just as weak open source communities look uglier and uglier the more someone gets behind them.
Thus, it was refreshing to see Red Hat give up on JOnAS in favor or JBoss, with Matthew Szulik admitting to Linux Insider:
We are very impressed by the people at JBoss and the technical capabilities of that organization. We think they are superior to the Red Hat Jonas implementation. What we would like to do is take the best from the Jonas implementation and make that available to the JBoss developer team where that makes sense.We need more candor like that. When an open source project (or proprietary bit of software) proves to be a dog, dump it for something better. Take Crouch out of the game, as it were, and put something better in: something proven (Rooney), something exciting and promising (Walcott). But anything but Crouch.
(Btw, France looked TERRIBLE against Switzerland. I'd find it shocking to find out anyone on the team actually likes each other - they play with zero team spirit. Trezeguet should have played. And Ribery, we (Arsenal) no longer want you. No one cares how well you can dribble - just how well you can slot a pass into Henry or someone else who actually knows how to shoot.)
Posted by Matt Asay on June 15, 2006 06:01 PM
June 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
A kindly Microsoft developer has taken a crack at explaining why Vista is so late.
Ask any developer in Windows why Vista is plagued by delays, and they'll say that the code is way too complicated, and that the pace of coding has been tremendously slowed down by overbearing process. These claims have already been covered in other popular literature. A quick recap for those of you just joining the broadcast:
Windows code is too complicated.
It's not the components themselves, it's their interdependencies. An architectural diagram of Windows would suggest there are more than 50 dependency layers (never mind that there also exist circular dependencies). After working in Windows for five years, you understand only, say, two of them. Add to this the fact that building Windows on a dual-proc dev box takes nearly 24 hours, and you'll be slow enough to drive Miss Daisy.Windows process has gone thermonuclear
Imagine each little email you send asking someone else to fill out a spreadsheet, comment on a report, sign off on a decision - is a little neutron shooting about in space. Your innocent-seeming little neutron now causes your heretofore mostly-harmless neighbors to release neutrons of their own. Now imagine there are 9000 of you, all jammed into a tight little space called Redmond. It's Windows Gone Thermonuclear, a phenomenon by which process engenders further process, eventually becoming a self-sustaining buzz of fervent destructive activity
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 15, 2006 07:31 AM
June 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open source licensing and the persistence of evil
I'm in Southern Utah, taking in Zion National Park and a family reunion. In between mountain biking, group hugs, diaper changing, and eating (Asays always eat, no matter where we are or what food is available - we eat a lot), I managed to finish reading Jon Levenson's Creation and the Persistence of Evil. The premise underlying the book seemed interesting, and I figured it might help me understand how Dave Rosenberg manages to exist despite a benevolent creation. :-)
Unfortunately, it's not very interesting reading. Academic to a fault, and dry to the point of sin.
Still, the central thesis is interesting. The best summary comes from a reader's review on Amazon (link above):
...Levenson makes a compelling case for the idea that the act of creation consisted (and consists!) of God's mastering preexistent forces of chaos rather than the simple, unopposed production of something out of nothing--and that these forces were not vanquished but continue to exist under restraints that are subject to fluctuations in God's vigilance. In this view, creation is neither static nor finished but is, as the subtitle suggests, a drama requiring ongoing application of divine attention and energy. And creation was, and is, a process of ordering reality by separating things, by establishing and maintaining boundaries.In other words, things were not created ex nihilo (which is a poor translation, anyway) but rather ordered out of chaos. A nice bridge to the scientific view of the earth's creation, too, but this is not the place to stir up that silly debate....
Now, lest you find this post overly religious in nature (it's not intended to be), I actually find it oddly familiar to the "creation" of open source. (Yes, I see open source everywhere and no, I will not equate Richard Stallman with God, no matter his St. Ignucius jokes on this subject. :-)
The GPL, to be effective, couldn't have been created ex nihilo. Instead, it had to conform to the existing copyright system. In many ways, it orders that system for the benefit of customers and developers. No, it doesn't allow Microsoft to take without giving back, but that's a good thing, not a bad thing. The GPL, as Eben Moglen beautifully describes [Video] in his Red Hat Summit keynote, is quintessentially American. It, not the proprietary software shams masquerading as "American as apple pie". It is copyleft that looks/feels/smells like free market capitalism.
But to succeed, it had to order the existing intellectual property world. This was Richard Stallman's greatest genius.
Open source, of course, has not "conquered evil." Nor will it if it manages to completely displace proprietary software (which is unlikely), because proprietary software is not evil. It's just chaotic. Inefficient. Weak.
But if you're competing in the market right now, you know that open source has, without question, restructured competition on its terms, and in its image. The question is no longer "Why open source?", but rather "Why not open source?" Customers are asking this question, and there is a growing tide of open source vendors who are ready with exceptional open source licensed-products at the ready.
Over time, more and more vendors will recognize the inherent weaknesses of proprietary software licensing, and will opt for open source. In the meantime, the best vigilance against backsliding into chaos (proprietary software, where interoperability and integration happen either not at all or by subjugation, with sparse middle ground between the two) is winning with open source.
Just be sure to rest on the seventh day. :-)
Posted by Matt Asay on June 13, 2006 07:42 PM
June 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft loves open source (but worries about GPL infection)
Peter Galli of eWeek has an interesting article entitled "Can Windows and Open Source Learn to Play Nice?". It's a decent attempt to bridge the (apparent) divide between Microsoft and the open source applications, and other software, that run on Windows.
"Open source is a way of building software and, in its most basic sense, there is nothing incompatible [between] the concept of open source and commercial software.I think, first off, that Bob needs to drop "commercial" versus "open source." I have to think that Red Hat considers itself very commercial. So, though the nomenclature might suit you, Bob, try using the more accurate term for Microsoft: closed. Proprietary. Whatever. I don't think you view the word as"But the GPL has an inherent incompatibility that is, to my knowledge, impossible to overcome," Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of Microsoft's server and tools business, told eWEEK in an interview here at Microsoft's annual TechEd developer conference on June 12.
A commercial company has to build intellectual property, while the GPL, by its very nature, does not allow intellectual property to be built, making the two approaches fundamentally incompatible, Muglia said.
Licenses like the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and commercial software, on the other hand, are quite compatible with one another, he observed.
"We are open to ways of working with the open-source community broadly, and even in the GPL space we are trying to find ways in which we can build bridges to GPL, but the bridge has to be carefully constructed," Muglia said.
Secondly, the GPL flap strikes me as much about nothing (and I'll resist making the joke that Microsoft worries GPL'd code might infect its own code with things like security, quality, stability, etc. :-). Over half the downloads of SugarCRM, JBoss, Alfresco, etc. are on Windows. Not Linux. Not Solaris. Windows. And everything is just fine. No, these are not GPL products - they're MPL or LGPL. But a GPL application could run on Windows with nary a hint of trouble for Microsoft. This is old news. Apparently, Microsoft hasn't been reading the news for the past, oh, six years?
Speaking of "better late than never," it seems that part of this open source outreach has been spawned by a realization that not everyone cares to run on Windows:
The goal, from both sides, is to meet customer needs, he said, adding, "This is just the more mature view of the way the world is evolving, and we want to make sure that if customers are choosing Linux or other open-source-based products that we have ways of interoperating and working effectively with that."Can I just say, "About time!"? I've been advocating this move for over a year. It's a clear, important strategic move. But it has apparently been lost in the glaciers of Redmond. I credit Bill Hilf (and Jason Matusow, before him) with getting this moving. The next step, of course, is to help open source projects/companies interoperate with Office, and not merely Windows/IIS/SQL Server. Anything can run on Windows - that's easy, and only marginally interesting. For open source applications companies, integration with Microsoft applications is the higher value partnership.
I genuinely think Microsoft wants to cooperate with the open source world. Not because it is generous, but because it is in its shareholder interest to do so. This is the right motivation for any corporation. It still has a lot to learn but, then, so does the open source world.
One thing that I wish is that Microsoft would cast aside some of its cherished positioning. Some of it was noted above, but here's a final one that drives me crazy:
...[I]ntegration is tough in a distributed environment, and architectural boundaries have to be set up between components, which is a good thing, he said. Now Microsoft plans to do as much of that as it can in the future.The (major) quibble I take with Bob's statement is that the kind of integration he's talking about only works between Microsoft products (and even then not very well much of the time) - the rest of the world has understood "distributed integration" for some time, because we live in a heterogenous world. Welcome to it, Microsoft: glad to see you may have to play by the rules the rest of us live by, now that you're winning a lot less often than before.Open source, on the other hand, historically has had a tough time building integrated solutions in that distributed fashion, Muglia said, and, "Our customers demand that from us. So there are certain things we have to do that are core to our development and our customers that we can't learn from open source because they are not doing that."
Come on in. The water is fine. Just don't mind the sharks. :-)
Posted by Matt Asay on June 13, 2006 05:48 AM
June 13, 2006 | Comments: (0)
52.5% to sit out Vista's launch
Well, actually, 100% of the world will wait on Vista, because it's always on the horizon...never quite getting here.
According to an article in SearchSecurity.com, there are a myriad of reasons for this. Most interestingly to me, though, is that many of these same IT professions surveyed seem to have no hard-and-fast aversion to Microsoft products at all. The delay in their adoption seems to be similar to their past delays in adopting Microsoft (and any other new) products:
When Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released nearly two years ago, most IT professionals said they were worried about compatibility problems and that they'd wait a while before deploying it in their enterprise.To those of you interested in Vista's "enhancements," I'd recommend you get Macs. You'll get double the improvements in stability, ease of use, etc., and infinitely more security.The full release of Vista, the next big upgrade for Microsoft's operating system, isn't due out until early next year. A new survey though suggests Vista is already being viewed with skepticism similar to what was directed at SP2 in 2004.
According to a survey by Boca Raton, Fla.-based Amplitude Research conducted on behalf of Albuquerque, N.M.-based security firm VanDyke Software, more than half of respondents said they have no plans to deploy Vista when it comes out, despite all of the security improvements that Microsoft says will be baked into the operating system.
Amplitude culled the information after surveying 255 network and system administrators last month from a variety of industries. The enterprises also varied in size. Of those polled:
- 10.98% are testing the limited beta version of Vista.
- 19.21% are waiting until the public beta release to begin testing.
- 25.49% are waiting until the official release to begin testing.
- 5.09% have plans to deploy after successful completion of beta testing.
- 20% will deploy after successful completion of testing of the official release.
- 11.37% will deploy after Service Pack 1 for Vista is released.
- 11.37% will deploy only on new PCs with Vista pre-installed.
- 52.15% said they have no current plans to deploy Vista.
Of those who do plan to test or deploy it, 58.33% said their primary interest in Vista is its "enhancements," while 30.12% cited "improved usability."
To Microsoft, I'd heartily recommend you do with your product what (increasingly) everyone else does when they want to make it secure: open source it. Sure, this is a naive statement for a company that has been the poster child of Proprietary, but you would boost trust, arguably find a wider, deeper array of bugs before (and after) general release, and a more efficient distribution mechanism.
Try it. You'll like it. Even Mikey likes it.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 13, 2006 05:02 AM
June 12, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Gartner: Open source applications are hot
For those of us deep in the open source applications business, this is not news. But for those who still think we're light years away from open source applications going mainstream, you need to jump ahead with your handy-dandy time machine. The future is already here. Thus reports IT Week:
Speaking ahead of next week’s Gartner Open Source Summit in Barcelona, the research firm’s Nikos Drakos predicted a new wave of programs beyond the relatively mature open-source operating system, development tool and database sectors.He's right. I can say from my own experience that enterprises - both big and small - are moving heavily into open source applications. No better time than now to capitalize on the interest in open source with the excellence of open source.These will include collaboration, portal, content management and business intelligence tools, said Drakos. “Open source is moving beyond infrastructure,” he added. “There’s already a lot of fairly mature and popular products in middleware, operating system and programming tools and on top of that there’s various bits and pieces in process repositories, search engines, database drivers and templating tools. It takes a lot less effort to think about portals and content management systems and there is now a basis on which high-value tools can be developed.”
Drakos pointed to examples of companies such as Zimbra in messaging, SugarCRM in customer relationship management and Alfresco in content management.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 12, 2006 07:59 AM
June 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Windows Genuine Advantage is the great Satan?
Far be it from me to suggest that Microsoft is evil. The fact that there is an application that Windows more or less forces you to install without disclosing at the time that it will report back on your license status every day, is an abuse of consumer trust. I get the whole pirated Windows thing, but come on.
Basically this means that Microsoft is looking at some aspects of your computer every day, but *could* watch and report on everything you do--every day. Not that we didn't know it was possible, we just didn't know it was happening. I have to think France will be filing a lawsuit asap.
Via AP: Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker.The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction. For example, if the company suddenly started seeing a rash of reports that Windows copies were pirated, it might want to shut down the program to make sure it wasn't delivering false results.
Link: Download Squad
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 9, 2006 11:30 AM
June 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)