Once More unto the Breach

MeeGo: Nokia, Intel and the Future of the Mobile Internet Platform

This week Intel and Nokia announcement the merge of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms into MeeGo, a single platform for mobile computing. This is a great announcement for a number of reasons.

Nokia demonstrated it's ability to participate within active open source communities as it developed and launched the N770 tablet as a consumer device and maemo as a computing platform several years ago. (The N770 pre-dates the iPhone.) This wasn't a cut and run on the Linux kernel to grab a fork then forever be stuck supporting it. This was an excellent demonstration to themselves that they could use an active royalty free OS and continue to share the development costs. Ari Jaaksi's report on the experience is enlightening. Nokia has since acquired TrollTech, released the Qt tool kit appropriately, (and then acquired Symbian Ltd. and released its handset OS software assets into the open source wild through the Symbian Foundation).

Intel developed and released Moblin over the past few years as a Linux distro for mobile computing. They carefully positioned it NOT for handsets, but for all the other cool mobile Internet devices in your life like tablets and in-vehicle systems. They could do lots of interesting device related work on the Linux kernel for things in which the mainstream Linux wasn't interested and still get the cost advantages from shared development for the platform as a whole. In a very short time it has become one of the more interesting Linux distributions from a hardware innovation perspective.

The positioning is key here. By focusing this on "mobile Internet devices" they avoid the whole iPhone versus Android debate, Windows Mobile has no comment to make, LiMo is still wandering in the wilderness, and Symbian isn't in a position to comment. All of those are thought of as handset operating systems. This is future forward and about the mobile Internet. And don't just think iTouch and tablets in the coffee shop. Think of your home as a wifi space. Microsoft and Apple continue to demonstrate that people DON'T want another PC in the living room for media management. So what are all the other devices you can imagine in your home that are NOT "computers" that could become the synchronization hub of your world's information and media.

• What about a wifi device suctioned to my refrigerator door where the shopping lists are kept and the family calendar at a glance (with reminders),
• or a device that looks like a VoIP phone with a wireless handset in a stand that also has the family phone book(s) in it, but synchronizes with your mobile phone handsets for calendars and contacts,
• or what if my "media centre" didn't look like a media centre at all, but was a tablet that talked to a black box shoved out of site behind the couch, but would also sync my mobile phone or Kindle or Nokia N900 Internet Tablet,
• or there was a small charging pad on the kitchen counter where keys and mobile phones and personal media players are dropped to sync across family calendars, contacts, and the latest episode of a show I'll watch or listen to on tomorrow's commute (while inductively charging my phone).
• What if all these devices could communicate with one another?

All of these imaginings will need an operating system. Microsoft may have made computing in the home ubiquitous in a PC-centric world, but no consumer OEM or ODM today will want to repeat history and watch all high margin profits go to a single software company via royalties. Maintaining individual forks of Linux isn't cost effective either. But sharing the value creation of a robust complete applications platform in an open source project free to all would certainly answer the call.

IT Customer Buying Patterns and Vendor Competition

Tail light chasing your competition means you will NEVER own a concept in your customers's minds. Matt Asay recently blogged about Novell's continuing practice of chasing Red Hat in the Linux market rather than defining itself on its own strengths, (in this case offering support for Red Hat servers cheaper than Red Hat). He rightly addresses the woolliness of their thinking and closes by saying:

Instead, Novell should be focusing on the things it does really well, like its powerful SUSE Studio technology, which makes it super easy to build Linux-based appliances. Novell is never going to be a better Red Hat than Red Hat. It should focus on being a better Novell. That positive message is what CIOs buy.

The post also includes a fragment of a leaked memo from a Red Hat country manager crying foul against Novell in a memo to a customer. Some consider this a sign that Red Hat is beginning to misbehave in its arrogance.

Here's what I think Novell is up against: Is the customer "happy" with Red Hat is the wrong question. This applies equally to both pricing and arrogance issues. There are few inflexion points to grab. Novell's opportunities aren't around offering cheaper support, but have to be looking forward to the next ground they can grab in customers's minds.

From my historical perspective as a customer, (and this was confirmed in recent discussions with CIOs I trust), customers never "trust" vendors, and in fact expect them to misbehave to maximize their own revenue. Customer organizations manage their IT budgets as a portfolio (especially large complex organizations with lots of "platforms" to support). Switching solutions means retraining, instability in something complex that isn't "broke", and the savings would need to be enormous to consider the conversation at all. And it's not enough to save a lot on the specific vendor competitive situation because the customer is actually judging the savings against their entire portfolio.

Let me borrow an example from discussions and a blog post from three years ago. Saving even 50% per year on a Red Hat support contract by switching to Novell is irrelevant. The risk of instability isn't balanced against a commensurate savings in the overall budget (against say the IBM or Oracle annual spend), or new value-add to the company. It's not worth the conversation. Matt rightly points out that the savings of moving from Red Hat to CentOS is 100% and the form factor exactly matches Red Hat. Is the customer "happy" with Red Hat is the wrong question. They're not unhappy enough with the value-to-conversion risk to make the conversation interesting compared to all the other more interesting value generation projects they're undertaking or savings in the ugly parts of the budget.

What this means is that once established, there are few opportunities for the 2nd place guys to break-in. The market leader already owns a concept (or concepts) in the customer's mind. It's not about differentiation. It's about owning the differentiation in the customer's mind. ("We're cheaper" is already owned by CentOS.) You need to catch the next technology wave and own a particular definition faster at a time when the customer technology office is already at an inflexion point so a "new" vendor is an obvious part of the discussion. For Novell, this might mean positioning all the great technology in SuSE Studio on cloud appliances for the intranet. Today the message seems to be focused on getting more ISVs to compete with Red Hat's perceived success with ISVs. Positioning this technology to solve the ISV problem backwards is irrelevant. (Near as I can tell Red Hat and Novell each have roughly the same number of ISVs and I'm betting there's substantial overlap. Red Hat has again created the perception that they have more ISVs in a customer's mind. They were likely first to grab the ISV market, and they have entrenched the concept in customers minds.)

Nobody knows what cloud computing will mean for the large organization IT shop. Positioning SuSE Studio as the perfect way to "build virtual internal application appliances for your internal cloud", with all the supporting materials, examples, tutorials and the like is a possible way to own "in-house application appliances" in the customer's mind before Red Hat or IBM or some clever start-up comes along and does so. Then Novell can talk about the value proposition of SuSE as a secondary complementary [larger] revenue stream. Following Red Hat means you'll always be second.

Berkus's Ten Ways to Destroy Community and Bacon's Art of Community

This was a great week for reviewing "community building" resources in my world. I discovered Josh Berkus's recent Java One presentation, "Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community", and I received my reviewer's copy of Jono Bacon's "The Art of Community". [srw — I was a pre-publication reviewer for Jono.]

Berkus's presentation is absolutely brilliant. After pointing out very tongue-in-cheek why your community is such a painful group of people (e.g. "They mess up your marketing plans by doing their own marketing and PR" or "They mess up your product plans with unexpected innovation"), he proceeds to give you a perfect run down of ten ways to be rid of them with excellent examples. In order:

1. Difficult Tools
2. Encourage Poisonous People
3. Don't Document Anything
4. Closed Door Meetings
5. Lots of Legalese
6. Bad Liaison
7. Governance Obfuscation
8. Screw Around with Licences
9. Stop Outside Committers
10. Be Silent

The sad part of this list is how true it is. While Josh picked examples from his experiences, too often you visit a site to evaluate a company-led (or consortia-led) open source project to find too many of these counter principles in play.

Jono's book was published last Summer. His lyrical metal prose conveys his brilliant experiences over past years in community involvement, then community development, culminating in one of the best led community examples around Ubuntu. While Jono's eleven chapters don't align neatly with Josh's ten weapons of mass distraction, there is method and madness to attack each of the problems (or hopefully to avoid them altogether).

1. Difficult Tools [Chapter 5]
2. Encourage Poisonous People [Chapter 9]
3. Don't Document Anything [Chapters 3-5]
4. Closed Door Meetings [Chapter 3,4,8]
5. Lots of Legalese[Chapter 8]
6. Bad Liaison [Chapter 11]
7. Governance Obfuscation [Chapter 8]
8. Screw Around with Licences [Chapters 1,2,8]
9. Stop Outside Committers [Chapters 4,8]
10. Be Silent [Chapter 3]

If you need a quick litmus test to check on your community, read the presentation. Once you [honestly] suspect there may be a problem [or two], dig into book. Enjoy.