Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.
What, me worry?
It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. This is no doubt why Red Hat has made "free-to-paid" a core element of its ongoing strategy, as related in its recent earnings call.
But it's a much bigger threat to Novell and Oracle, both of whom are trying to position themselves as cheaper alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If a customer really wants Red Hat at a lower price, they're not going to move to an incompatible distribution that may or may not run their applications properly. They're going to jump to CentOS, which is basically a carbon copy of RHEL, minus the trademarks (and price tag).
Oracle, for its part, is clearly not in the Linux market. It's in the market to eradicate Red Hat, so as to claim top-to-bottom control of its software stack. But even as Oracle tries to squeeze Red Hat into oblivion, CentOS provides an excellent hedge against commercial competition from Oracle (and Novell), making its pitch ring hollow.
CentOS: Red Hat's biggest annoyance and greatest friend?
It's not dissimilar to the role that piracy plays for protecting Microsoft's Windows dominance against Linux, especially in emerging markets. Quite possibly the worst thing that Microsoft could do, as IDC has also suggested, is to succeed in its anti-piracy efforts.
Were Microsoft to raise its pricing above $0.00 in such markets, suddenly Linux would look like a much better alternative.
Back to Novell and Oracle. It's not enough to try harder. Red Hat has created a dominant global brand that CIOs trust. It's not worth a few dollars here and there to disrupt that to shift to SUSE or Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Not when those CIOs can shave 100 percent of their RHEL subscription costs by moving to CentOS.
I know some CIOs who have, but they tend to be enterprises with lots of developers that are comfortable supporting themselves. Fortunately for Red Hat, few CIOs care to take that risk. Unfortunately for Novell and Oracle, those who do want to save all of their Linux subscription fees, not just some of them.
The logic of open source is increasingly clear to a growing number of businesses. Ironically, however, that logic generally dovetails with a recognition of how to marry open source with a proprietary revenue driver.
Once you figure out the scarce good for which customers will pay, open sourcing everything else becomes a no-brainer.
Google, Red Hat, and a wide variety of other businesses have all discovered this. So has Nokia, as Glyn Moody writes:
...Once (Sebastian Nyström, vice president of application and service frameworks in Nokia's Devices unit) laid out the logic of moving to open source, there was very little resistance within the company to doing so. I think that's significant; it means that, just as the GNU GPL has been tested in various courts and found valid, so the logic behind open source--that openness allows software to spread further, and improve quicker, for the mutual benefit of all--is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way.
Sort of. What's becoming self-evident is that open source is a fantastic way to drive community value, which funnels prospective customers into purchasing proprietary value born of scarcity. Whether Google AdWords or Red Hat Network, it's the same phenomenon.
In other words, it's not that businesses have bought into the ideological allure of freedom. It's that freedom can more efficiently create a large base of prospective customers for something else.
Moody cites IBM as an example of a company that has seen the light on the benefits of open source. Indeed it has. Open source enables IBM to sell billions...in proprietary hardware, not to mention the billions in proprietary software sold on the back of open-source software, as IBM's Savio Rodrigues articulates:
In the WebSphere division, we contribute to countless open source projects, including the Apache HTTPD, Dojo Toolkit, and Eclipse Equinox projects. We then utilize code from these projects with IBM enhancements inside of WebSphere Application Server. This strategy allows us to do more with less.
Indeed, I'd argue that such open-source software commitments are easier when a company has a clear proprietary strategy to justify and monetize them.
That's why it's easy for Web 2.0 companies to shovel money into open-source development communities: open source channels more customers of their (closed) cloud offerings.
It's also why we see more vendors turn to investing in (e.g., IBM in Apache) or founding (e.g., IBM in Eclipse) open-source communities, rather than controlling their own, self-branded projects, a trend highlighted on Thursday by The 451 Group's Matt Aslett. Vendors that have proprietary selling points elsewhere don't need to control open-source code.
Cynical? No. Businesses aren't charitable organizations.
Even Google. Even MySQL. Even Red Hat. Most people tend to forget how irate "the community" became when Red Hat introduced Red Hat Advanced Server and stopped supporting its consumer customers. Red Hat was forgetting "the people" to serve "the Man."
Years later, Red Hat is considered the paragon of open-source virtue. And well it should be: Red Hat is particularly good at balancing the hard-headed realism of profits with the idealism of open-source software.
As more companies discover the strategic, pragmatic advantages of open source, we'll see even more of it. As Gartner's Brian Prentice correctly argues, "While the romantic open source narrative is failing, Open Source continues to get stronger."
For many of us, open source's allure has always been about William James pragmatism, not Richard Stallman idealism. Yes, you need the idealism to keep pragmatism honest, but without the "logic" of money (and IBM's initial $1 billion commitment to Linux), open source would never have become the global phenomenon that it is today.
Open source can save governments and enterprises tremendous amounts of money--but not always. Lower cost is not always the primary driver for IT deceptions. That's why policies of preference for open source, not mandates, make sense.
Open-source mandates have always seemed like a terrible idea to me, just as mandates to use proprietary software are. When a problem demands the turn of a screw, you don't want to be clobbering it with a hammer.
The Dutch police force understands this, which is why it has explicitly decided to prefer open source in IT purchasing, but to not use open source exclusively.
This is a sound, pragmatic approach to information technology, one that an increasing array of organizations are embracing.
Even so, sometimes our open-source aspirations fall short of reality. For example, the Symbian Foundation, the organization behind the open-source Symbian project, says it favors "open source wherever possible," yet it lists few open-source projects actually powering its IT infrastructure.
Perhaps its desire for software as a service trumped its interest in open-source software?
It's very possible. As stated above, cost, which generally favors open source, is not always the compelling differentiator.
Sometimes, however, cost weighs so heavily in open source's favor that a refusal to use open source demands an answer.
As reported on Slashdot, for example, the auditor-general of Canada's Ontario province issued a report indicating that the government wasted about a billion dollars on an electronic system for medical records when a credible open-source alternative existed, one that was already in use within the province.
A policy of preference for open-source software might well have averted such apparent waste of taxpayer dollars.
Preferences retain flexibility to fit the right tool for the job, while still encouraging open-source adoption. Mandates, like any form of coercion, tend to breed rebellion.
Just ask government IT employees throughout Latin America. During my last trip to Argentina and Brazil, I spoke with system integrators who specialize in open-source software. I asked them if their work with government organizations had become easier since those governments had passed legislation favoring open source.
Nope. In fact, the opposite seems to have occurred, as employees have dug in their heels to avoid being forced to deploy software that may be a mismatch for either their skills or the IT problems at hand. One comment I heard: "It's one thing to legislate and quite another to enforce."
Open source doesn't need mandates to succeed. It's growing explosively, and adoption is widespread. Preferences can help that, but mandates arguably won't.
To beat Apple in mobile, Google is going to need more open-source developers. But it's also going to need more Google.
Take me to your leader(s), earthling
Such developers, however, also want more choice than Apple offers them. Somewhere in the resolution to that tension is a big market opportunity for Google, one that carriers and consumers are going to give it time to figure out.
Google's Android efforts have looked Apple-esque at times, as Linux Journal notes. This is a problem. Google may not have discovered "the evil room" on its Silicon Valley campus, but even a hint of "evil" from Google could send developers packing.
But Google is no Apple: its DNA meshes well with that of open-source developers', as Tom Foremski notes. The company really doesn't want to do evil.
Its dilemma, however, is that it may not be able to avoid some of the "evil" that upsets open-source developers. Like control. Control is critical to good software, something that the best proprietary and open-source software has long demonstrated. Linux, for example, depends upon Linus Torvalds serving his role as "benevolent dictator."
The difference is that it's easier for Linus Torvalds to be autocratic than Google. He's an individual. Google is a company.
Even so, Google isn't going to beat Apple at its own game (i.e., deathlike grip over all aspects of a product). To win, Google must marshal an external development community, one that doesn't like to be managed and, as Dan Lyons (aka "Fake Steve Jobs) points out, one for whom rebellion in the form of 'forking' is par for the course.
Google is therefore left with a strategy that depends upon diversity not wanting to be overly diverse.
This is a challenge, but also an opportunity.
If the company can learn to exercise Linus Torvalds-like control without appearing to dominate Android, the project will win. It certainly has a lot of people cheering for it. It also has growing experience that suggests it's learning to walk the fine line between community and control.
As CNET writes, "device makers see Android as their biggest hope to compete against Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices in the smartphone market." Bingo. Carriers can't afford to cede all control to Apple and RIM, and consumers remain individualistic enough to demand devices that fit their needs, whether they're based in India or Canada or Armenia.
The world isn't going to abandon that diversity to uniformly converge on the iPhone. It's just not. There is no one handset to rule them all, Sauron-style.
And so long as it's not, developers will give Google leeway and time to figure out the optimal development model for Android.
While TechCrunch highlights technical problems with Android's handset support, this strikes me as a short-term, highly solvable problem. It's a relatively safe bet that Google will figure out ever easier ways to manage development across diverse devices, as others have done.
Volantis, for example, offers an open-source approach to manage Web development across an ever broadening array of mobile devices: 6,000 and counting. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Volantis.)
Google could do the same. It has time. As ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn writes:
Google's cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
With over $4 billion in mobile advertising revenue that Coda Research Consultancy is projecting for 2015, it's worth it to Google to figure this out. I suspect that, like Red Hat's certified Linux, over time we'll see Google certify Android applications. There are more mobile devices than different servers and server architectures, but it's essentially the same problem.
Developers may find Google's control of Android irksome, but it's less burdensome than Apple's winner-take-all-and-we're-the-only-winner approach, and it's worth it to see device compatibility issues dissipate.
President Obama gets a lot of credit for his pro-open source policies, but the United States has been funding open source well before he took office.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which describes itself as the principal federal agency for extending "assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms," has been in the habit of funding open source abroad since at least 2007.
As but one example, USAID kicked off its Open Source Development 2.0 challenge last fall.
The contest and other USAID activities led to a wide roll-out of Joomla, an open-source content management system, throughout the Mongolian government, including 200 of its Web sites, as Elin Waring, president of Open Source Matters, a company that advocates Joomla adoption, told me.
But Joomla is just one part of USAID's global investment in open source. The agency has also created the Global Development Commons, which promotes U.S. interests by encouraging open development abroad. Apparently, the idea is that U.S. interests are served as local economies sustain and grow on their own, rather than requiring ongoing foreign investment.
Microsoft recently funded an IDC study, which finds that "software is a significant contributor that drives productivity and innovation in almost every sector of the economy." This may be true, but as I've argued before, governments would do better to expand local economies by building upon open-source software rather than shipping rubles/pesos/etc. abroad to import software from vendors like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.
In the case of open source, the software may come from elsewhere but it quickly becomes a domestic good as local firms tailor and improve it. With proprietary software, local firms can provide implementation services but they, as well as the end-customers, are always dependent on a foreign vendor for the core value.
The U.S. continues to buy plenty of proprietary software, but it's encouraging that when it comes to international development, the federal government recognizes that open source pays better long-term dividends than subsidies for the export of proprietary software. Even more encouraging, this practice appears to be neither Democratic nor Republican in origin.
Perhaps there's hope for bridging America's partisan divide, after all.
Postgres for years has lived in the shadow of MySQL's media attention: the "boring" database that quietly goes about its work while its sexy Web 2.0 cousin wins the popularity contest.
Recent data from the Eclipse Foundation, however, suggest that Postgres may be ready to make significant waves in the enterprise, even if it doesn't make headlines.
In a recent letter to European Union's commissioner of competition, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos stressed that MySQL's target market is the emerging Web database market and that the enterprise IT market was never really a source of strength (or focus).
Postgres is the opposite.
Postgres is an enterprise Java database, more suitable for carrying corporate data than the Web's consumer data. According to a 2009 survey by the Eclipse Foundation, MySQL (27.7 percent) and Oracle (27.3 percent) were the top-two databases used by those surveyed, with Postgres registering a respectable but still distant 9.9 percent.
Given that Oracle database users are far more likely to use Java as their programming language to develop server-centric applications, while MySQL users are three times more likely to use PHP as their primary language (17.4 percent of those surveyed use it, versus 5.4 percent for all users) to builde RIA/Web applications, Postgres is clearly more Oracle than MySQL.
Granted, the Eclipse community is traditionally Java-centric, so it's not surprising that Java would be prominent among its developers. But it's also the case that enterprise IT remains a Java/.Net market, and in such a market Postgres could be poised to boom if it can muster sufficient marketing to make its message heard.
This is where EnterpriseDB comes in.
The MySQL community would not be as well-developed as it is without MySQL, the company. MySQL AB has funded the overwhelming majority of MySQL database development, but it has also provided the marketing muscle to make a name for the Web database.
Postgres has traditionally been a standalone, organic open-source project with little concerted corporate involvement. EnterpriseDB has started to change that, but for too long wrongly fixated on competing with MySQL, a database that serves a different market and different developers. The company also spent too much time talking about Oracle migration technology, rather than focusing on why Postgres is a great database.
That may be changing.
Postgres just released version 8.4 of the venerable database. In EnterpriseDB's discussion of the release, there's no mention of Oracle, MySQL, or any other competitor. Instead, EnterpriseDB seems to be focusing more on its commitment to Postgres development, adding significant enterprise hardening through its open-source Postgres Plus distribution.
It's a welcome change, and one that could position Postgres to take a bigger share of the enterprise Java database market--not because it's cheaper than Oracle or more open than MySQL but because it's a great database in its own right.
That's the right messaging for EnterpriseDB...and Postgres.
Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users.
We miss the mark on open-source marketing. In fact, it's often the case that the very standards we seek to set for the software world--interoperability, transparency, etc.--are better observed and delivered by open standards than by open source.
As a case in point, Red Hat and other open-source companies (including Alfresco, my employer) routinely advertise "no lock-in" as a key reason to buy open source. There are two problems with this marketing pitch: one, it's only technically true, and two, customers don't care, as Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady recently noted.
On the first, it's true that open source can reduce vendor lock-in by ensuring that a customer can get support and ongoing code development from someone other than the original developer of the software. But this is only trivially true.
Once a customer invests in a particular vendor (be it Red Hat or Canonical or Novell or MySQL or...), there will always be a cost associated with leaving that vendor, a cost that arguably isn't much different whether that vendor's code is open source or proprietary.
Cost aside (which is easier said than done, as cost is the primary consideration for the buyer), the support options for Vendor X's code from Vendor Y or Z are unlikely to be on par with what Vendor X can deliver. Just ask Red Hat about CentOS or Oracle Enterprise Linux support. ("Compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux can only be verified by Red Hat's internal test suite.")
Apparently there's no lock-in...so long as you stay with the original open-source developer. :-)
The reality is that open-source vendors should be pitching real value to real customers. As Josef Assad presented at the Open Source Days 2008 conference, open source should strive to "lose the TCO (total cost of ownership) war with proprietary vendors." Open-source value is about performance and flexibility at a great price--and not necessarily about absolute freedom from lock-in.
Red Hat gets this. That's why most of the time it sells the value of its subscriptions, and not the hocus-pocus "no lock-in" story. Red Hat doesn't have 75 percent of the paid Linux market (or, probably more accurately, 62 percent, according to IDC) because of its lock-in story.
Would-be customers don't care about that. Really. They just want Red Hat's performance and price, especially compared with Unix.
In fact, to the extent that customers really do want interoperability and reduced vendor lock-in, it's open standards that they should be asking for, not open source.
IBM's Savio Rodrigues points this out in his analysis of the different permutations on the open-source WebKit project. Serdar Yegulalp adds to the analysis:
Source code is a building block, not a standard. It's something you turn into other things. A standard is something that stands above and apart from all of those things, a guideline for what that finished product ought to be like....
The problem with using code as a standard is simple: it's too fluid. The minute you implement it in something, it's not the same code anymore. It almost always has to be changed to fit its container, as water changes to fit.
Open source is an indispensable complement to open standards, but it's not a substitute for them.
This isn't the only area where open-source vendors misread customer tea leaves. For years open-source insiders have debated definitions for "open-source vendor," even as customers shrugged their shoulders and continued using open source--from different vendors with very different business strategies--without worrying about the various shades of ideology and pragmatism that fuel open-source development. I'm as guilty of leading this foolish march as anyone.
Real customers simply don't care.
This is why I think Sun open-source guru Simon Phipps' proposed expansion of the Open Source Initiative's charter is misguided, though very well-intentioned. (The 451 Group's Matt Aslett also weighs in on the proposal.)
Phipps wants the OSI to establish a "holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked" because too many companies, apparently, are calling themselves "open source" without a consistent definition for what this means.
I don't think it matters. The reality is that businesses don't seem to have any trouble adopting open source regardless of such "truth-in-labeling" initiatives. Gartner suggests that 85 percent of businesses are already using open source. Forrester tells us that a big majority of enterprises are adopting open source because it's delivering real cost and quality benefits to them.
And so the problem is...?
Well, the problem is that open-source advocates are often out-of-sync with open-source adopters. We probably need a new breed of open-source advocate, as ZDNet's Jason Perlow suggests, the kind that reflect customer interests in pragmatic adoption and not advocates' interest in controlling and fine-tuning that adoption.
We don't need paternalistic oversight of open-source adoption, and we don't need to fuel it through vague and inaccurate marketing. Open source is a fantastic way to develop and distribute software. Customers recognize this and don't need to be cajoled or confused into buying.
Mårten Mickos
As the European Commission continues to evaluate the potentially deleterious effects of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its open-source MySQL database, concern is rising that delay will harm MySQL without helping competition.
One who shares this concern is former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos. On Thursday, Mickos sent a letter to Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, urging that the deal be approved for the good of the market and MySQL. He also spoke with CNET News' Stephen Shankland on Thursday.
Below is the edited full text of the letter.
Helsinki 8 Oct 2009
Mrs. Neelie Kroes
Commissioner for Competition
European Commission, J70
B-1049 Brussels/Brussel
BELGIQUE/BELGIE
Dear Commissioner Kroes,
I am writing to you regarding your review of Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. As I understand it, the EU Commission is concerned about a risk of undue concentration of power in the database market. Having been the CEO of MySQL from 2001 to 2009, and built a business that was serving a new market unmet by Oracle and others, I can agree with the questions posed, but I do not share the concerns that have been expressed. In the following, I will explain why.
In brief, my reasoning is as follows:
- Oracle has as many compelling business reasons to continue the ramp-up of the MySQL business as Sun Microsystems and MySQL previously did, or even more.
- Even if Oracle, for whatever reason, would have malicious or ignorant intent regarding MySQL (not that I think so), the positive and massive influence MySQL has on the DBMS market cannot be controlled by a single entity--not even by the owner of the MySQL assets. The users of MySQL exert a more powerful influence in the market than the owner does.
Many expected Oracle to harm MySQL as far back as 2005, when they acquired the InnoDB storage engine that plays a crucial role for many MySQL customers. And yet Oracle increased their investment in InnoDB since that time, making MySQL a stronger player in the market.
For further detail on my views on Oracle's intent, please see this interview with me in Forbes Magazine in April 2009.
It may at first blush seem counterintuitive that control of the MySQL assets does not automatically bestow control of the MySQL installed base. But the free installed base of MySQL--enormous on a planetary scale--is voluntarily but not mandatorily coupled to the commercial market of MySQL. It produces huge benefits to the MySQL business, but it is not controlled by it.
Background
The impetus to write this letter comes from my concern with the talented teams of the MySQL business unit and of Sun Microsystems in general. I am also troubled by certain factual distortions about a subject matter that I am intimately familiar with: MySQL and its business model. Open-source business models are complicated and quite different, and it took many years to fully understand and shape the one of MySQL.
A Finnish citizen, I served as chief executive officer of MySQL from early 2001 to February 2008, when Sun acquired MySQL. After that, I served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun until the end of March 2009. Being the only person to have served as the CEO of MySQL and to have attended every board meeting ever held, I believe I have unique insights into these matters.
To be clear, I resigned from my position in March 2009, and I presently have no commercial or financial interests in the MySQL ecosystem, Sun, or Oracle (or any other vendor in the DBMS market, for that matter), other than my loyalty to Sun employees in general and the MySQL team in particular.
MySQL's Markets and Installed Base
MySQL is the world's most popular open-source relational database, and potentially the most popular relational database of all. It has an enormous influence and impact on the usage and the buying patterns of relational databases (also known as RDBMSs), in particular for Web applications. One might even state that the Internet would not be what it is today, were it not for MySQL. Staffed by a highly talented team of passionate employees, the Swedish company MySQL grew the MySQL business from a small one in 2001 to a massive one in 2008.
"MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge (community) phenomenon MySQL...On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL...Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.
In this discussion, the term "MySQL" refers to two things. On the one hand, there is the huge phenomenon MySQL--an estimated 12 million active installations under a free and open-source software license, millions, if not tens of millions, of skilled users and developers, and tens of thousands of corporations who use MySQL one way or the other.
On the other hand, there is the business of MySQL, which is growing rapidly, thus rewarding the owners of the assets (currently Sun Microsystems).
Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.
What I mean is that the vast and free installed base of MySQL is using it of their own free choice, unencumbered by the vendor and under no obligation or restraint. That is the nature of open source. And conversely, the MySQL business is supporting the free installed base of MySQL (by improving the product) voluntarily and in the hope of deriving benefit from the installed base.
This is the paradox of an open-source business, and it took me a long time to truly understand how powerful a force it is. It is unlike any traditional business. The key point is that both the users and the vendors of open source are engaged in a powerful free-market dynamic that cannot be contained by any single entity.
It is in everybody's interest that the two sides of MySQL produce benefit for and derive benefit from each other. But neither group can mandate or control the other one. This is a core philosophy of open-source software and more generally of the "architecture of participation" (as defined by Tim O'Reilly). There is a mutually beneficial voluntary relationship, but there is no control by one group over the other. In more colloquial terms: the owners of MySQL cannot force MySQL users to pay up, and the nonpaying users cannot force the business to subsidize them.
Anyone acquiring the MySQL assets will therefore acquire an ability to control the business aspect, i.e., meaning how MySQL is licensed commercially, but only an opportunity (and no free reign) to derive benefit from the free user base.
This explains how the MySQL business can be valued highly in the market ($1 billion, when acquired by Sun in February 2008) while at the same time providing no way of controlling its installed base. This unusual relationship between market share and installed base is at the core of the topic. The market share is small but controllable, to some degree. The installed base is enormous but not controllable. The installed base is, and can be, hugely beneficial to the owner of MySQL, but only to the extent and for as long as this owner of MySQL enjoys the trust of the installed base.
To put it in numbers, it may be useful to see the usage of MySQL, as divided into three categories:
... Read more
Symbian has the market share; Apple's iPhone has the mind share. The future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open-source developers. Microsoft, with its long-standing interest in developers, also needs to reach out to open-source developers, if it wants to succeed.
Part of this reason is cost. As IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests, Research In Motion could reduce its cost and improve the reach of its platform through open source:
RIM should be utilizing R&D investments more effectively by leveraging existing open-source projects. RIM could have built (its software development kit) for a lower investment by starting with PhoneGap or an equivalent open-source framework...This was absolutely a missed opportunity for RIM to compete versus Apple, Palm, and others using open source.
No, I'm not going to suggest that RIM open-source the BlackBerry Enterprise Server; that would be silly. Rather, I believe RIM could have saved R&D costs, increased the value of its BlackBerry platform, and influenced developers building for the iPhone, if RIM had built the Widget SDK on top of (an) open-source project like PhoneGap.
Symbian is taking this road, as Michael Mace points out, putting developers, and not itself, at the center of attention. The more money third-party developers can make with Symbian, the better off Symbian will be.
Palm, too, is trying to appeal to open-source developers by making it cheap and lucrative to develop for Palm devices.
Apple's world, by contrast, comes with a hugely sexy device, optimized distribution...and low return on investment for its developers, according to Newsweek. In Apple's world, developers add value to Apple, but not necessarily to themselves.
Microsoft is different. Although the company has not committed its mobile strategy to open source, it is a company that has a serious romance with developers. With 97 percent of its sales coming through its channel, Microsoft depends upon third-party development and distribution partners.
Windows Mobile 6.5
(Credit: Microsoft)Now Microsoft is launching Windows Mobile 6.5, a light upgrade to previous versions that has failed to catch the media's attention. Today, the company has few--246, to be exact--applications available for version 6.5 in its Windows Marketplace for Mobile, but it has more than 20,000 designed for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1.
The question, however, is whether it can attract new developers to the seemingly moribund Windows Mobile, which declined in market share to just 9 percent of handsets shipped in the second quarter of 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. An open-source complement strategy, similar to what it's using for SharePoint and its CRM product, could help.
It must, as Google is calling.
Microsoft has no choice but at least dabble in open source, regardless of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's publicly sanguine stance on Google. Open-source Google Android is starting to make waves, even if its momentum can be overhyped. Verizon has jumped on the Android bandwagon, citing the "unmatched openness and flexibility of the Android platform."
Open source isn't an afterthought for Google. It's a core business strategy. And it's winning converts.
Ballmer pooh-poohs Android and further discards "free as a business model," but he acknowledges that Android represents open source, with significant financial resources behind it.
There's more to it than this. Free is a great business model, one that Microsoft has used to tremendous effect, as Internet Explorer, SharePoint, Bing, and other Microsoft successes demonstrate and as Techdirt highlights.
Microsoft needs to integrate open source into its mobile strategy. It needs developer attention. As CNET's Ina Fried reports, a recent Windows Mobile 6.5 session at Code Camp attracted just six developers. You don't win with numbers like that, and you don't get developers without open source, anymore.
Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple. Microsoft rightly recognized early on that building products soup-to-nuts, as Apple does, was not the best model to achieve ubiquity (even if some suggest that this model has broken the PC industry). That model works great, early in the formation of a market, as Clayton Christensen theorizes, but it loses its efficacy in mature markets.
Mobile doesn't yet count as "mature," but it's getting there fast.
An enabling strategy similar to what Microsoft did on the "desktop" would succeed in mobile, too, but it's going to require a Googlesque open-source approach for Microsoft--not the Apple approach.
This isn't to suggest that Microsoft should open-source everything. As I learned from my own open-source mobile days at Lineo, to build a successful business in mobile (or elsewhere), you've got to own something.
Google is interested in owning the advertising that results from greater mobile Web browsing and other mobile services. For Microsoft, it could match this, and extend it with ties to its server and personal computer businesses, like SharePoint. It probably can't afford, however, to try to build a big per-unit licensing business--not with Google undermining that model with its free Android.
Microsoft simply needs to find the right "format" in which to deliver its open-source mobile strategy. The software giant has 90,000-plus employees. Surely, one of them can figure this out.
In the battle for supremacy among the software industry's Big Four, Cisco may be placing the biggest bets and angling for the biggest returns. Some still think of Cisco as a networking hardware vendor, but hardware is simply Cisco's beachhead into others' turf, similar to how Microsoft (desktop), Oracle (database), and IBM (everything) are using core strengths to move into adjacent markets.
If anyone needed further confirmation of Cisco's software aspirations, its forays into Linux offer a strong hint.
In what might have looked like a publicity stunt around a $100,000 prize for Linux developers, Cisco's Linux development contest was actually a major clue as to just how serious it is about becoming a leading server vendor with a global development community--and soon.
Today, Cisco announced the winners of its "Think Inside the Box" contest. The three winning applications are very interesting, but the bigger story here is what Cisco's contest just demonstrated:
Most of Cisco's 7 million installed Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) are now servers, for all intents and purposes.
The contest proved that server-side Linux developers who know C/C++, Java, or Python can now write applications to Cisco routers with little or no knowledge of routers. (Remember: the finalists only had 90 days to write their applications).
That's a development community of millions, folks. Overnight.
Still think Cisco is a hardware company? By fostering a developer ecosystem around its core router family of products, Cisco just made its hardware solutions much more valuable to its customers (and increased the stickiness of its customer relationships), and turned its routers into a big target development platform for developers.
I wrote about Cisco's contest last June as Cisco's way of paying developers to stick a finger in the Microsoft eye with a $100,000 bounty for writing Linux-based applications for its AXP (Application Extension Platform).
I clearly underestimated Cisco's ambitions.
This is doubly clear when correlated with another Cisco announcement this week about its new and expanded Cisco Developer Network, which SearchNetworking covered.
Cisco is serious about software and fostering a global developer community. As I argued in my "Software's Big Four" blog, each of these companies is entering new markets from incumbent positions of strength, unlike HP and SAP (which both have big software businesses), which are largely sticking to existing businesses.
Millions of Cisco routers already sit in data centers and branch offices around the world. They consume less power than servers. They have a smaller footprint. They're more secure. And they enable a class of applications that Cisco calls "network-aware." Just slot in an AXP blade hosting an application.
Basically routers are much smarter now, and with the right applications can be used to take control of your phones at night to monitor for burglars; manage HVAC, water, and power in your office; deliver advertising in your retail store; and much, much more.
There are two things Cisco still lacks, however, in order to make an unimpeachable bid for developers. First, it needs to move off Broadcom chips for its ISRs and add x86 chips to the mix, something that I'm hearing rumblings may well be on the way.
Second, as impressive as Cisco's outreach to Linux developers has been, the company also needs to support Microsoft's .Net/Windows developers. It's too big a market to ignore.
If Cisco can deliver on x86 and to Microsoft developers--and I think it just might--Cisco will have opened its router (server) family to an even larger development community than the already large Linux market, further blurring the distinction between routers and general-purpose servers.
The result? A formidable software company that sprouted out of a dominant hardware company. How would Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM react?
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