Is Microsoft playing well with others?

That's the headline of a recent article by CNet's Martin Lamonica.  In it he covers both sides of the debate through the past year with lots of excellent examples.  We have things like:

• Bill Hilf's announcements supporting partnerships with SugarCRM and JBoss over the past six months.
• Bill Hilf's announcement about VirtualServer support for Linux.
• Bill Hilf's announcement of Port 25, which he hopes to become sort of Channel 9 for the Linux and open source world.

Do we see a pattern here?  Let's contrast it instead with other pronouncements from Microsoft on standards and open source from the last couple of quarters:

• Alan Yates and Jason Matusow commenting on ODF as a closed "standard" despite multiple implementations from a variety of vendors, versus their own proprietary specification which they're rushing through a standards development organization (ECMA) so they can claim to have a standard too.  (And this doesn't begin to cover the lobbying nastiness around Peter Quinn in Massachusett's over the ODF war.  That's a helluva way to treat a customer.  Almost as good as threatening them with BSA audits.) 
• Despite creating an ECMA standard around C# and the Common Language Infrastructure, and a "shared source" research project, they continue to throw up licensing ambiguity around the Mono project, and deny it birds-of-a-feather meetings at their developer conference, despite it being the only other real implementation of their standard.  (Maybe this is a clue to future messaging and practises around companies and projects that try to implement the coming Microsoft Office format initiative at ECMA.)
• Don Dodge's blog commentary on the Red Hat acquisition of JBoss where he is deliberately divisive in his commentary, and naive with his open source rhetoric that reflects a Microsoft of four or five years ago.  He started the discussion on Redmonk's James Governor's blog in the comments and rolled it to his own blog. 
• While a year old, Bill Gates started 2005 off unable to resist another "communism" barb thrown in the open source direction (that was later echoed by Shai Agassi):
  "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get
  rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers
  under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should
  exist." And remember, culture comes from the top of an organization. 

It's Dodge's entry that actually provoked this post in the context of Martin's article.  After laughing at open source developers that have contributed to the JBoss code base without getting rich, Dodge makes all the traditional Microsoft rhetorical blunders around patents, litigation, "working for free", and support. 

At one point he states, "The Open Source phenomenon has been difficult for venture capitalists and business people to understand."

That's certainly not been my experience the past few years.  The VCs I regularly interact with are at worst deeply curious about the business model with sharp insights and good questions, and most have become quite savvy.  They recognize that it's just economics.  As a business development director in Microsoft's Emerging Business Team, I would have thought that Dodge would be more inquisitive rather than divisive, and less prone to throwing around old rhetoric.  Perhaps he needs to meet with Bill Hilf so he can get "on message."  Or maybe, he already is on message. 

Bill Hilf is ex-IBM and can be trusted to use open source projects and practises tactically to serve the business best.  I don't think that's a bad thing at all. Indeed I still think that my former employer is missing a huge opportunity, but that's old news.  But Bill's initiatives seem to be the only co-operative ones we hear about lately from Microsoft in the open source software space, and they're essentially Linux focused.  In a company of 60,000 Bill Hilf is one person.   

Post to del.icio.us
digg it

Comments

[james governor]

i thought VCs had stopped investing in MS infrastructure startups... ;-)