Once More unto the Breach

Irony, OpenOffice, Open Source, Shared Source, and Microsoft Office (and Standards!)

Update (19-Sep-2005): I didn't know how prescient I might be at the time.  The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has made a decision to move to the Open Document Format.  Coverage begins here.
Update (25-May-2005): The podcast for this post is up here.
Irony is a wonderful thing.  As my OED would define it:

irony n. E16. [L ironia, Gk eironeia, simulated ignorance, ...] ... 3. fig. Discrepency between the expected and the actual state of affairs; a contradictory or ill-timed outcome of events as if in mockery of the fitness of things. ...

Slashdot recently carried the [resurrected] story about the head of Microsoft in the Ukraine being forced to use OpenOffice on Linux to display their Microsoft PowerPoint™ presentation about Shared Source.  Sort of takes your breath away, doesn't it.   As was pointed out here this is actually an old story (October 2004), however it brings a number of interesting things to mind.

There's lots of debate and opinion on whether or not a Linux desktop is ready for prime time deployment.  A year or so ago things looked like they might begin as IBM started trying the subtle and not so subtle game of encouraging enterprises to review their desktops between task workers (could go to a "simpler" desktop) and knowledge workers.  That didn't really seem to catch on and sweep 10%-15% of the desktops away to Linux, despite backing analyst reports. 

I don't believe however that it's a Linux desktop that will be the truly frightening thing for the Microsoft hegemony.  It will be OpenOffice on Windows XP that will cause a revenue slide, a few quarter on quarter losses and the shareholders to react bluntly. 

Firefox has given Windows XP desktop users a taste of open source.  The average consumer isn't downloading source code and building it from scratch — they're merely downloading the binaries and discovering it's a more than good enough user experience and it isn't as malware prone.  (Once I started running Firefox, Adaware SE stopped finding things on my computer.) 

OpenOffice on Windows XP becomes an interesting next step.  r0ml (who also works at Optaros) talked about maintaining a software portfolio similar to a financial portfolio in his Open Source Business Conference talk on "The Paradox of Choice" in April 2005.  The idea is that you might want to spread your software investment across a number of applications that perform the same function to lower risk. 

With no licensing fee, it becomes a very inexpensive experiment to load OpenOffice on a large class of workstations in the average enterprise that already pays for Microsoft Office through its Enterprise Agreement.  OpenOffice reads Microsoft Office documents in a very direct manner.  As not-a-power user, but a regular report and essay writer, I've certainly had no problems with Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents since switching 8 months ago to OpenOffice.  The user interface is familiar enough. It maintains the features I've always used in writing (e.g. footnotes, comment tracking) and there's only been once that I really couldn't figure out how to do something in OpenOffice in a text document.  I ended up doing what I wanted in Microsoft Word, pulling the document into OpenOffice and discovering what it looked like there, and discovered I was using the wrong terminology in OpenOffice help searchs to find what I wanted to do.  I do all my work in OpenOffice now using OpenOffice document formats, and when someone tells me they require a Microsoft formated document, I simply save the document that way for them.  The ability to generate PDF for distribution in OpenOffice is also a god send. 

As a legal user of Microsoft Office, it was easy to try OpenOffice.  All of the PCs at my house have legal copies, as do my parents and inlaws.  I now live in OpenOffice all the time.  When I was a Microsoft employee, I had access to the Microsoft Company Store and its steep (order of magnitude) discounts on Microsoft software.  I joined the Microsoft Alumni on the way out of the company primarily to maintain access to the Company Store, but I must admit, the membership is looking less attractive all the time if all I want is a couple of XBox games a year. 

I can't imagine it would be too difficult for an enterprise to include a small web app on the desktop to collect reports of documents and features that didn't convert cleanly into OpenOffice as part of the experiment to see what features really need to be considered in the Microsoft documents, and how many users actually depend upon those features or macros.  Once those numbers become apparent, the enterprise procurement team can then have a different discussion with the Microsoft account exec when they arrive to negotiate the next three year enterprise agreement.  Think about it: I need an enterprise agreement for 50,000 copies of Windows XP Pro over the next 3 years, but only 25,000 copies of Microsoft Office — priced accordingly.  This support "futures" idea also comes from r0ml's presentation.  There is actually an opportunity for Microsoft here — but who wants to bet they don't see it.  It's simply not their modus operendi.

Lastly, let's talk about innovation.  Microsoft will hammer away at the message around innovation in Microsoft Office and all the incredible work that's coming in the next release.  For the moment, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume there really is cool innovation coming in the next release.  (I worked there long enough to know how many smart people really are working incredibly hard to deliver very cool technology in the box.) 

Sadly, it's NOT about the innovation.  Clayton Christensen uses an example in some of his public talks about the new new disk drive technology and innovation.  The newest hard drives are incredibly small, and pack fantastic densities of information.  The engineering teams delivering them are incredibly innovative, squeezing cooler technology on cooler technology to get the drives even smaller and faster, etc.  And in the market, all this innovation is worth about $1 a gigabyte.  It doesn't matter how smart those teams are, how hard they worked, how many marriages were destroyed getting to the product release finish line.  It's still worth about $1 a gigabyte. 

As Christensen points out, it is about delivering a solution to a problem the customer wants solved and is willing to pay money to solve.  In the Innovator's Dilemma, he talks about over delivering on functionality, but in the Innovator's Solution he gets into what actually happens in the market at that point.  When an encumbent starts over delivering, and customers can't absorb the new innovation fast enough, (and therefore are unwilling to pay for it) a call for standardization comes from the marketplace. 

Let's think about that in light of the fact that Microsoft Office has been over delivering since about Office 2000.  (How fast did you figure out how to turn OFF smart tags?)  And now the standard has arrived.  You have to admire Sun on this one.  Small nudges in interesting places like hiring Tim Bray and encouraging the EU around data formats and things quietly got done.  It must have been horrible to be the Microsoft point person on that standard.  On the one hand, you don't WANT the OpenOffice format as the standard (because you'll have to spend time and money to implement it eventually to sell certain government contracts).  On the other hand you don't really want to give up your own formats because it's been such a great lock for so long, until you overdelivered.

Irony, again.

Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face
Ironic, Alanis Morisette, 1995

Podcasting the IBM Bluecode Acquisition and Microsoft on Community

Well I went and started exploring podcasting.  I still live on a Windows XP desktop, but otherwise use nothing but free and open source software, so I went hunting and discovered Audacity.  Considering that I've never tried this before I was amazed at the interface.  A little experimentation and I created the closing material around my audio blog creative commons license, the disclaimer, and the animal effect.  It was three separate tracks, at different sample rates, but it was easy to move segments around and save it as an MP3 file.

I worked from a script in each of the two podcasts.  I essentially grabbed the blog entry from here into OpenOffice, and reading it aloud, editted it to a script.  I generally read my writing aloud before publication as a self edit technique, so it wasn't too much of a reach.  Two pages turns out to be about 5 minutes of podcast.  That was a bit of surprise.  A minute of audio in MP3 seems to be about a MB. 

My heart was racing fast enough and the adrenalin was just shrieking through my body while I recorded myself.  I clearly worry too much.  (I used to say that you should do something every day that makes you a little afraid and takes you out of your comfort zone.  I think I'm good for a month now.)  Between the "script" edit, a practice read, the recording, and then final compose and test and post, it probably took an hour for the first five minute podcast.  I honestly don't know how radio people do this for a living in real time. 

I'm using BlogMatrix as the backing for the podcasts, setting up the audio version of Once More unto the Breach.  It's a simple interface for uploading podcasts and video, and supports RSS feeds with enclosures.  The first podcast is an audio version of "Or Maybe Microsoft Could Join the Community".  The second is an audio version of "IBM, Gluecode, and Open Source Business as Usual". 

As for the animal effect reference, well I thought I might "brand" different podcast topics with different animal sounds like O'Reilly does with animals and book covers.  I'll leave it to you to figure out the code.  As always, comments and suggestions welcome. 

IBM, Gluecode, and Open Source Business as Usual

Update: You can find a podcast of this blog entry here.
IBM announced the acquisition of Gluecode this week. In their own words: "Now customers and Business Partners can tap into the low cost of entry of open source technology to quickly develop and deploy applications, and migrate to WebSphere software as business needs expand." There's some nice commentary around the benefits of open source and the strength of trusted enterprise level service and support, and they very clearly position the Gluecode Geronimo offering as entry level application serving on a diagram showing the evolution to scaled high transactions on Websphere. Here's the CNET article on the announcement with some good thinking around it.

Stephen O'Grady (RedMonk) has a great Q&A styled analysis of the acquisition which I would encourage you to read, so I'll provide (hopefull) supporting commentary.

• IBM seems to understand Geoff Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle really well. They have done a lot of work around Linux (with an incredible number of influence touch points) to manage the AIX curve. While selling Linux aggressively against Sun, they have told us that AIX will absolutely be replaced by Linux ... in 10 years. This is about customer account management and control and giving customers well crafted messages through the relationship.
• Recently, Gartner moved JBoss into the same upper right quadrant of the app server world with Microsoft, WebSphere, and WebLogic. Love such reports or hate them, a lot of enterprise executives read Gartner reports and attend Gartner conferences. So IBM needs to ensure they deliver the same well crafted message around Websphere as they did around AIX. While they can talk about entry level app serving around Gluecode, this isn't about small-medium business — it's about enterprise messaging.
• IBM is well versed in the game of Apache licensed code.  The licensing discussion is nicely encapsulated here: "The rationale for Geronimo over JBoss was that it would be more open, less vulnerable to the whims of its owner vendor. Instead, even though IBM haven't bought ownership of the Geronimo code, they do own the core developers. And every contribution made by third parties in the OSS codebase ends up benefiting the IBM distro. That is the price of the BSD license: you don't need to publish your additions, but everyone else has the same right. Which is precisely why (L)GPL makes so much sense for startups trying to retain control of their software. MIT/BSD/Apache licenses are good for universal adoption, but not retaining control of "strategic" technologies."
• Marc Fleury's commentary is to be expected, but I think he misses a few things:
  • IBM has been using open source as a business tool for 7 years at this point since joining the Apache community. They have a lot of experience here, building over time, from Apache involvement, to Linux, to their own Eclipse strategy.
  • Marc says IBM wants to kill JBoss.  IBM is far more interested in account control and the customer relationship than they are in the competition. The community may have strong opinions about the relative merits of Geronimo and JBoss, but the average CIO reads the news. They now have reason to pause when they look for a replacement for expensive Websphere licenses using scaled out multimachine solutions, instead of simply exploring JBoss, or Microsoft's embedded solution. While Gartner says JBoss is maturing, IBM is loudly doing something with Gluecode, so the careful CIO will look at both — and customers will ask them in to discuss things and the conversation can begin, if indeed it's not merely a continuation of an existing conversation. You sometimes need to perturb the message of your competitors to begin the conversation with your customers. Through the acquisition they can perturb the message of Sun, BEA, JBoss, and Microsoft all at once. It's a bold enough move, all the existing CIO customer base is probably calling their IBM account execs to explain it to them.
  • "While we are focused on improving developer productivity with our work on simplifying Enterprise Java at the EJB3 standards level and in our own JEMS product suite, IBM's announcement adds complexity for their customers and partners, not simplicity." Don't misunderstand the feet on the street power IBM applies around "industry standards" and the number of touch points for influence they have across the plethora of related consortia and standards efforts. Even if you understand the power of this, you won't have enough people in a company the size of JBoss to keep up. IBM will bury working groups in virtual paper. Don't forget your partners have their own agendas and when it comes to standards, IBM remains one of the few companies that genuinely uses its reach to participate rather than issue press releases about why some effort isn't important.  In the standards arena, participation equals influence.
  • "If evolution has anything to teach us, it is that hostile environments accelerate mutations and natural selection favors the fittest organisms. We are the leaner, faster party, with the true professional open source community base." Marc's confidense is admirable. He might forget, however, that lots of agile species die while figuring out the environment. IBM isn't a dinosaur, it's an elephant, and elephants and their evolutionary kin have been around a long time and learned to dance.

The risks of embedding a GPL licensed JBoss would be higher (though probably not insurmountable.) So Marc probably didn't get an offer.   

But Matt Asay's blogging of the acquisition takes us into a slightly different view of the space.  As he correctly points out, a driver for acquisitions is expertise. This is why one might buy rather than participate. IBM certainly has that level of the game figured out, as seen in their participation around Apache, Linux, and the development of Eclipse. Websphere integration (and Eclipse integration) can more easily be done when you employ the community leaders.  But it gets better: think Harmony.

Stephen O'Grady's summary on Harmony is a good summary pulling together the relevant posts across the discussion (including Miguel de Icaza's mono-coloured experiences).  But with Gier Magnusson as a central figure in Harmony now at IBM through the Gluecode acquisition, and the fact that IBM has a JVM that could be licensed as open source, and they have the testing resources to solve any compatibility concerns, it makes the discussion more interesting in the never ending influence games around Java.

Or Maybe Microsoft Could Join the Community?

Update (22-May-2005): You can find a podcast of this entry here.
There's an eWeek article entitled "Microsoft Reachs Out to Open-Source Community". In it Brad Smith (Microsoft General Counsel) makes the following fabulous statement:

"We're going to have to figure out how we can bring the various parts of our industry closer together. Not necessarily in the sense of changing the way software is developed, but building bridges so that we all have the ability to collaborate with each other. And that will mean we will need some new rotations, I think, in how we work together, in how we license, in how we share technology or intellectual property rights with each other."

Pardon? The rest of us already are. You can too. Join business relevant open source communities. Start more of your own. The free and open source software communities have been figuring this out for a while now. So have your competitors at Sun, International Business Machines, Oracle, Novell, and SAP.

We could sit down and have yet another circular dialogue on patents. You'll point out intellectual property is important. (It is.) Various capital-C community spokespeople can point out that patents can get in the way of open source software projects. (They can.) And around it will go.

Or, you could DO something. It's not like there aren't enough people inside Microsoft that don't already know what to do.

Matt Asay asks that we give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt when they say they want to build bridges. The way one builds bridges in the community is to join the community. There are no barriers to entry. The open source projects aren't gated. Participate by a community's rules. Earn the respect of that community. Earn your reputation. You can even change the reputation you may already have. Your competitors did it. And they did so for very competitive reasons. So here are some fantasy projects to consider:

1. Join the Apache community.  Ensure Apache runs brilliantly on Windows. Improve the management of Apache in a Windows managed world. Make Windows the best managed environment for running Apache. And MySQL. And sendmail.
   
2. Join the Mono community. Ensure the Mono CLR runs better on UNIX to drive adoption of C#/CLR as a cross platform environment. Then deliver a better implementation of the ECMA specs on Windows so the richest web service delivery platform could be Windows. Contribute the Base Class Library code from Rotor directly to the Mono community as a real olive branch. Contribute the test harnesses from Rotor. Imagine the consternation on Novell's, Sun's, and IBM's faces when you do this.
3. Join the Eclipse community. Find out WHY so many people in the Eclipse world are working on Windows, and find out where the line between Visual Studio and Eclipse should be. By all means keep certain code clear of Eclipse (like performance enhanced compilers), but how many colour coded editors does the industry need?

Free and open source collaborative development communities represent what might be the best answer we've seen to date in our industry for software re-use. To buy versus build you could add "borrow" and "share" to your business tactics for product development and driving the business.  Source code is a valuable intellectual asset, but your software business — what you represent to your customers — is so much more than the source code. Come out and join the community.

Update: 5 May, 2005:  I found Dori's post via Scoble.  In it she makes the following point: 
"The fact of this business is that disruptive technologies happen, whether you like them to or not. If you create them yourself, you've got some control over how/when it happens. If you refuse to create them yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself when you become obsolete. It's the difference between good products and great products.

So Microsoft — go break something. Then you'll be interesting."

Dori's tackling the issue from a different perspective, but the point is same.  I've argued before that Microsoft has huge opportunities around open source as a disruptive business model.  This is conceivably what IBM is doing around Linux, smoothing the slope of their technology adoption life-cycle for AIX.

So Microsoft — go break something.  Join the community.