Once More unto the Breach

The Microsoft SD Forum Open Source Event

Microsoft and the SD Forum jointly sponsored the Zero Day event this year before the Open Source Business Conference. The past two years this has been a Microsoft sponsored day for ISV partners developing businesses around open source. There was time dedicated in each event to presentations of the relevant Microsoft programs for ISVs, and Sam Ramji would kick off the day with a good Q&A session discussing Microsoft's positions, accomplishments, and announcements around open source software. This year the content was broader, with the afternoon's sessions being organized by the SD Forum. Participants that wanted to engage with Microsoft around their programs could talk with any of the program directors present.

This being the age of Twitter, people were encouraged so to do under the tag #msoss09, and there was some reasonable discussion throughout the day. I also posted a few photographs on Flickr.

www.flickr.com

Bryan Kirchner is now Director of Open Source Software at Microsoft. He acted as master of ceremonies and kicked things off in the morning with a brief discussion of his hopes to continue developing a mutual understanding and deepening relationships with the open source community at large.

Sam Ramji then took the stage. What followed was interesting. This year, with not much new or contentious before OSBC got underway, he chose to talk about the health of the Windows ecosystem in the context of the current economic crunch (reminding people that a staggering 96% of Microsoft revenue comes from partners, i.e. no direct account control). Microsoft is seeing CIO training budgets dropping to zero and many projects are deferred so there was a definite move to cost savings around virtualization and consolidation. (It's interesting that this is how the world started to move when the bubble burst seven years ago.) He also talked about the growth of Windows in the low cost server space and on netbooks. Sam was essentially conveying that the Windows platform is healthy and people should continue to consider it as a deployment platform for open source. He also discussed the new Web Application Gallery initiative at Microsoft as an attempt "to connect markets and forges" around open source so users can easily install and support PHP-based web applications. It's not that the Gallery is particularly an open source initiative, but rather that it supports the sharing of applications written in PHP.

Matt Aslett from the 451 Group took the stage next presenting his latest analysis from their report Open Source is Not a Business Model. Essentially, the 451 Group analysed 114 vendors using open source software within their businesses, against (i.) their choice of open source license, (ii.) their development model, (iii.) their own vendor licensing strategy, and (iv.) the actual revenue trigger. Matt's blog post covers a lot of the ground he presented, so I won't cover it here. I will be debating with him soon on other things to consider in the report. (An added perk for morning participants was a copy of the report.)

Next up was a panel on "Working together in an Open Source World in a New Economy" moderated by Cliff Reeves, who runs the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft which runs the BizSpark program. Panelists included:

• Clint Oram, VP Product Management, SugarCRM
• Erica Brescia, CEO, Bitrock
• Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch
• Dan Merrits, VP Marketing, Eduify

It was a good discussion. SugarCRM and Mindtouch certainly saw the rise of downloads and leads as the economy failed and people became more interested in low cost open source based solutions. There was also interesting honest discussion from the participants on what it's like working with Microsoft as a partner, with concerns being expressed about the complexity of the programs at times, as well as praise for engineering support (FastCGI and PHP being the typical example cited).

After lunch we got to the more general open source part of the program organized by SD Forum. Larry Augustin kicked off the afternoon with his keynote on "The Future of Software: Why Open Source is the Safe Bet". [Larry has kindly allowed me to host his slides. Download SDForum-20090323-v4.pdf (493.5K).] Larry started the presentation with the idea that just like no one got fired for buying IBM in the past, at this juncture in history no one gets fired for buying open source software. He then went on to present the health of the open source based business world from the perspective of investment and adoption (with several case studies).

Next we had two brief mini-talks.

• Andrew Aitkin (Olliance Group) talked about his views on open source adoption differences between Europe, North America, and Japan.
• Sam Ramji returned to give a shortened version of his morning's presentation for those that just joined for the SD Forum part of the program.

The final two sessions of the day were panels. First we had "Is there still Open in Open Source" with Mike Fauscette (IDC) moderating, and Jack Repenning (CTO, CollabNet) and Adam Blum (Rhomobile). It was an interesting panel and very much a development process perspective. Discussion revolved around the idea that it's not about the source code, but about the openness of the development process, the social contract, the transparency, and building a community that wants to contribute.

Last up was the venture panel on "Where's the Money?" Mark Radcliffe (DLA Piper) moderated Robert Theis (Scale), Andrew Braccia (Accel), Tim Guleri (Sierra), and Peter Sonsini (NEA). Not surprising but the VCs want us to know they're still open for business, and they're interested in Software-as-a-Service and Cloud related technologies. Also not surprising we learned VCs will fund deals with a compelling solution to a customer problem, or a compelling way to monetize a solution. [This is why I generally don't have a lot of time for VC panels.] There was one point where Peter Sonsini (NEA) observed there needed to be a compelling way to monetize the community for an existing project (with which I violently disagree), but Andrew Braccia (Accel) supported the richer idea that rather than trying to monetize the community one should look at upstream value of a new solution based on the project.

All and all a worthwhile experience. We finished the day with the hosted reception!

My New Android Phone and AT&T Wireless

I was lucky enough to get one of the new unlocked Android developer phones from a friend at Google to keep me occupied. There are pictures here:

www.flickr.com

I'm an AT&T Wireless customer. I wandered into the store to ask if there were problems, and was told they didn't know. (I added the unlimited data plan for US$15/month while I was there, being ever so hopeful.) A quick Google about and I came across a post that pointed out the following settings (for AT&T and many more mobile operators):

Name: AT&T
APN: wap.cingular
Proxy: leave blank
Port: leave blank
Username:WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password:CINGULAR1
Server: leave blank
MMSC: http://mmsc.cingular.com
MMS Proxy: wireless.cingular.com
MMS Port: 80
MCC:310
MNC:410 (note. this could also be 310, 41 or 15)
APN Type: leave blank


Create the access point name (APN) from the Settings App->Wireless Controls->Mobile Networks->Access Point Names (hit the Menu button to bring up "New APN"). I selected the newly created AT&T APN and I was up and running.

Everything seems to work so far. Calls, SMS, MMS in/out all work. Need to spend a bit more time with the apps. The stock apps for Gmail and browsing and messaging seem fine. I'm learning to hit the Menu button when stymied about what to do next and it's not obvious. That typically brings up the options for which you were looking. I've loaded Twidroid from the Android App Store along with a few other tools (because everyone needs a command-line window and a telnet client on their phone).

The only thing proving really onerous is Google assumes I have my contacts on GMail and won't read anything from the SIM apparently. The synchronization between my old mobile phone (a Motorola Razr) and my desktop (a Mac PowerBook G4) is horrendously bad. So I'm needing to hand rationalize a lot of phone numbers. Tedious, but an opportunity to clean out the list. I'm going to go fix that problem more broadly soon regardless.

Now to download the Android SDK.

OSBC Keynote Competition between Sun, Microsoft, and IBM — IBM Won

I continue to stand in awe of IBM's ability to market. Here's how the line-up of executive keynotes went down this morning at OSBC.

First up was Jonathon Schwarz, Sun CEO. Jonathon always gives good presentations, although he seemed a little brittle this morning. His messages this morning:

• It's all about the cloud.
• We are it.
• It's still about business.
• [Please] buy our hardware.

Microsoft stepped in with Robert Youngjohns, President of Microsoft North America. An excellent soft speaker that quickly established his historical geek credentials and breadth of technology interests beyond Microsoft tech. He apparently even worked at both Sun and IBM. His messages this morning:

• It's all about interoperability.
• We get it [finally].
• It's still about business.
• [Please] buy our software.

Robert Sutor, IBM VP of Open Source and Linux, then finished with a virtuoso performance. It was about collective action. His messages this morning:

• It's all about open source and open standards.
• Linux is an amazing mature flexible solution for the world's information processing problems. "It's not a hammer, but a collection of fine tools." Our involvement in the Linux community is ten years old.
• It's NOT about business. It's about solving hard problems. [A nice paraphrase of Drucker's the purpose of a company is not to make money.]
• We [collectively] have the tools to solve these problems. We [IBM] can help you.

I think the only time he actually mentioned IBM was when he said in passing that they had broken the petaflop barrier last year. It was masterful. It was designed to remind you that IBM has depth of technology experience, and the tools (people, hardware, software, knowledge) to help you with your information management problems. It was a conversation starter between the company and customers. It wasn't about selling technology but rather tailoring solutions — just tell us what you need.

It doesn't matter what you think about each company. Good executive keynotes are performance art delivering a marketing message. (Bad executive keynotes are product announcements to audiences that paid good money to learn something other than the latest thing they're going to be forced to buy.) While all three presenters today are consummate performers, one message was about solving problems, the other two about selling stuff.

Long after Sun's been cut up for parts the way DEC was, and long after Msft stops trading, IBM will still be humming along as a technology solutions company with a mixed-margin portfolio offering, terrifying as that might seem for some. Well done, Bob.

Does Your Community Manager Report to Engineering or Marketing?

I asked a question during Matt Aslett's excellent presentation on Monday at the Microsft/SD Forum OSBC Zero Day event: Does your community manager report to engineering or marketing? Matt gently stepped out of the way, but there is exactly one right answer: Engineering.

Here's why:

Community is concerned with the software project and it's complementary assets. Customers care about buying product solutions to their problems.

Engineering cares about software development. Marketing cares about product lead generation and qualification.

Engineers manage software. Marketing manages messages and expectations.

This doesn't mean that the community isn't an enormous source of word-of-mouth evangelism for the company, the project brand, and self-qualified leads over time. But the community doesn't want messages and they don't want to be qualified or converted. The community is already setting their own expectations around the project instead of buying the product. Neither does this mean that marketing is out of the loop at developing inbound requirements from customers for the engineering team as they develop the software that feeds into the product.

While marketing traditionally managed the "developer network" in closed source companies, that's because the software wasn't a community engagement mechanism for users that weren't customers. Growing the developer community around your platform was a marketing function based on the business strategy of growing market share and providing complement value with lots of "knowledgeable developers" for customers. The software part of the solution wasn't a source of customer contribution, innovation, and testing resource. Your community equated to your customers.

There are companies that historically have strong product management departments that are often staffed by engineers that have crossed the floor to marketing. There's still a problem here with the community manager reporting to marketing, because the marketing department is traditionally measured on marketing functions. They will behave against how they're measured.

So community development and management is an engineering function.

Cloudera Launches Around Hadoop

Copyright Peter DaSilva for the New York Times

Congratulations! Cloudera launched today to bring Hadoop to the enterprise. It's anchored by Mike Olson, Christophe Bisciglia, Amr Awadallah, and Jeff Hammerbacher. Hadoop is the open source project that implements MapReduce, the algorithm that allows companies like Google and Yahoo (and even Microsoft) to search cheaply and easily enormous quantities of data and assemble the results. As most enterprises don't have the sort of operations staff that a Google might have, Cloudera will provide enterprise qualified software, training and consulting.

I've known Mike for a long time now since his days as CEO at SleepyCat before they were acquired by Oracle. I had the pleasure of working with Christophe as a speaker at the inaugural Open Source Forum at the Beijing Software Innovation Summit in China a couple of years ago while he was still at Google. It was Christophe that put together the original training program around Hadoop for university students. Congratulations and best wishes!

P.S. Christophe seems to have gone all corporate with his hair.

The launch video on YouTube

Third Annual Microsoft Open Source ISV Event at OSBC

Microsoft is sponsoring a zero day event for open source ISVs again this year, just before the Open Source Business Conference kicks off. These events are always interesting. Sam Ramji, Microsoft Sr. Director of Platform Strategy always hosts an excellent open discussion at the start of each day. While the world still hesitates over the use of "Microsoft" and "open source software" in any sentence, Sam continues to evolve the dialog. You may not agree with all Microsoft does or doesn't do, but the discussion is always worth it, and this event is a great way to interact with Sam directly.

The ISV team continues to work hard to help independent software vendors using open source software in their solutions to get the most out of a relationship with Microsoft. This year they are evolving the event's focus to include people from the Microsoft BizSpark program, which works to help new start-ups. I'll be moderating a panel in the afternoon focused on start-ups, with a number of technologists and VCs participating.

Attending the Microsoft event provides a discount off your OSBC registration. I hope to see you there.
Registration Site for the 3rd Annual Microsoft Open Source ISV Event

More on Open Source Conversion Rate Myths

A year ago I posted on open source business practices and conversion rate myths. A colleague asked yesterday whether we shouldn't still use it as a measure until a better one is found, since it's the best we have.

The problem isn't that it's a poor measure, but I believe it's a wrong and misleading measure. It is NOT similar to lines-of-code in software engineering (a poor measure). Variation in LoC is still within a few percentage points when you resolve for the project differences. Conversion rate is orders of magnitude different between companies. Business measures are typically within percentage points. Think of ratios like gross margin. They vary between types of businesses by as much as 30% but within an industry they're pretty steady and act as a benchmark.

Using a wrong or misleading measure will put you in jeopardy if you're the marketing or community manager. (You're being judged against the metric.) If you distribute for "free" as open source software, you capture your user base depending upon how good you are at getting the word passed onward. If you're good, you build community around your software. Remember software only forms part of the value network that is your solution — and customers buy solutions to problems. Mårten Mickos well observed that your early community is willing to trade time to save money and your later community is willing to trade money to save time — and the later community contains his customers. The observation implies a timeline for community growth depending upon the software project. Companies starting a business around a new project need to be sensitive to this. Customers (people that are going to buy something) will use free access to test that your software might solve their problem before they pay for your solution.

Many users in community do not have money to spend today. They can't be converted. As a "lead" they will never become a "qualified" lead, and getting in their way trying to sell to them will only be a source of frustration for everyone involved. BUT while in a normal proprietary software company this means you've disqualified someone that isn't a customer in the pipeline, in the open source corporate world, I believe they sit in a different process. Instead of a manufacturing metaphor (pipelines) we need a more organic social metaphor to track success and growth of the community. Lead generation is a measure of community engagement. You want to grow your community. Customers will self-qualify.

This WILL be reflected in a number of downloads, but this is correlative not causal, and it's an ambiguous metric. It's very software function dependent. If a user downloads one copy and installs it on a hundred machines, your knowledge is already off by two orders of magnitude — counting downloads is useless.

The greater user community still needs care and feeding because they contribute code, bugs, time to answer one another's questions, beta bodies, and interesting applications of your software you may not have thought about or had time to develop yet. They are a source of innovation, not simply within the software (small contributions) but at the solution level. They will tell your BUSINESS new places to go to capture money in the network around your software. These are very valuable people. Growing your community is important for this reason. Don't simply measure downloads and compare to a number of customers. Measure everything you can think of about your community:

• Unique members on the forums.
• Time to answer a question (internally versus community). [And don't reward your employees for answering quickly or your community will never get a chance to answer.]
• Number of code contributions.
• Number of bug reports.
• Number of documentation contributions (howto, tutorials, etc.)
• Feature requests.
• etc.

For numbers that tie back to specific releases of software, use them to tune your engineering process, i.e. involve your users in your engineering process. Consider letting USERS vote on importance of bugs so they feel a part of the process. (Don't draw the line between customers and users. It will be tempting, but customers probably buy something else from you in their solution. Disenfranchising users is disenfranchising the larger community of interest and probably a false feature.) Engage their time (appropriately) and you will win community mind share. Mind share is everything for profitability. It's the stickiness. It will create customer advocates.

There will come a time when the users move to other organizations bringing their knowledge with them and the new organization will self-qualify to become a customer. Or the user's own company grows to a point that they become customers. But they don't "convert" in the traditional sense. The lead did not become a qualified lead and you don't need to "sell" to them to convince them to buy your solution. They have internal needs that makes buying your solution more important than using your software. I'm betting those internal needs are very function-centric (e.g. one company will buy JBoss support while using RHAS for free). Determining those functional decisions in relation to your solutions will give you better insight into how to grow your customer base, i.e. revenues, without sacrificing your community in "conversion" games.

This comic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License from xkcd.org.