Once More unto the Breach

Microsoft and MySQL: A Thought Experiment

[Update (18-Jan-2007, 15:47 PDT): This article was translated into Hebrew.  I also continue the thought experiment here.]

I was interviewed by Scott Mace for Open Source Conversations on Monday morning.  In one part of the conversation, I created a thought experiment on some of the more creative things Microsoft could be doing with open source software to customer and business benefit.  This idea is way outside the box, but then that's exactly where they need to be at this point in history.  (As I said earlier: culture comes from the top, and if you expect your employees to get outside the box then you need to be their first.) 

I thought I would explain the experiment more carefully here, as I sometimes get going in conversation and I have no idea how coherent it may come across "live".  I can also better fill in some of the details.

Microsoft needs to start to explore open source software business processes better than the minor experiments they have done to date.  Steve Ballmer also wants to license the company's intellectual property.  So here's a way to do that using free software as the hook. 

1. Start by releasing the source code for SQL Server.  This is an opportunity to use an important but not critical product revenue stream.  [Yes, I do understand the revenue growth SQL Server 2005 represented — Microsoft readers need to keep reading and stop the knee jerk response.] 
2. Repackage the present product licensing into a subscription for SQL Server Network^TM, similar to the subscription-based support, maintenance, tuning offerings from Red Hat Network and MySQL Network. 
3. The key understanding here is that today the value of SQL Server to the customer ISN'T the source code, but rather the solution it provides. The value Microsoft provides isn't the source code, but all the testing, packaging, support and maintenance.  You don't NEED to drop the price of SQL Server Network below the existing price for the shrink wrap binaries.  Experiment.  Explore the conversation with key customers. 
   
4. Use the GPLv2 as the license.  GPLv3 is unproven (although I have confidence it will be great if still a bit controversial when it's delivered).  This is business conservative.  You can bet IBM DB2 engineers and Oracle engineers won't be looking at the code any time soon for [stark-raving shrieking] fear of product taint.
5. Construct a patent grant that allows any patents in the space to be used royalty free for database related work released under the GPLv2.  This enables the software to flow within the database community under the GPL appropriately.  The GPL actually becomes the brake on the technology slipping outside of the database arena.  Microsoft is still able to license this technology anyway it chooses in other arenas, or to people trying to "close" the source. 
6. Someone in a developing economy is going to promise Blue Hat SQL Server the next day.  There are several responses to this.  First, if you were betting your business data on SQL Server, would you buy support from Blue Hat or Microsoft — the people that actually develop and test it?  Second, understand that MySQL AB (the company) doesn't seem to be worried to much about "clones" — ask yourself why.  Third, Microsoft still controls the trademark.  Fourth, understand that the developing economy wasn't interested in shipping a lot of hard currency out of the economy for the privilege of using SQL Server anyway.  They were going to use Postgres or MySQL.  At least you're back in the game here, preparing for a future developed economy. 
7. It's an awesome way to find new SQL Server developers.  You will see changes and bug fixes.  Yes, the ratios of brilliance to cruft involve orders of magnitude, but there is no time-line for when good things arrive.  We've seen brilliance arrive in the first 24 hours on other projects.  This is a much better way to find future talent than interviewing.  It's certainly how MySQL has grown its development team. Managing the inbound contribution flow is easier than you think legally. 

Now this is where it gets interesting.  At some point, in the next 24 months, someone is going to try a "mashup" of MySQL and SQL Server.  There will be some SQL Server algorithm or function that's just plain too interesting to NOT try to use in MySQL.  Depending upon what it is, MySQL has a pluggable architecture that encourages such experimentation.   A large part of the MySQL install base lives on Windows. 

The licenses for such an experiment are compatible. 

But MySQL has an interesting portion of its business that depends upon its ability to license MySQL using something other than the GPL.  For this DB mashup to be anything other than an interesting unsupported experiment, MySQL would need to be able to license that code from Microsoft. 

MySQL has an excellent history and track record of licensing technology.  This situation would be no different.  If anything, it's Microsoft that would be under the gun to demonstrate it has the ability to boldly license where it has never licensed before now.  But intellectual property licensing it is, and it's enabled by free and open source software.

Of course, the reverse could also happen.  And Microsoft too licenses in all manner of intellectual property.  Again, the mashup is highly uninteresting unless Microsoft had sufficient rights to the MySQL bits to package as a product.  Makes you think.  There are lots of opportunities here.  It's good for customers.  It's good for shareholders. 

Based on current open source culture at Microsoft, I see at least six show stoppers in the seven items listed above.  That's why it's just a thought experiment.  But you have to admit, it's a great thought experiment. 

Advice to Microsoft Open Source Evangelist Candidates

It would seem Microsoft is looking for an open source evangelist.  A friend forwarded this Linux.com post to me.  I took a stroll through the Microsoft careers site and couldn't find an actual posting to match.  (If anyone has the job code, I'll happily post it here.)  I did find a couple of marketing manager positions however to work on the teams continuing the "Get the Facts" campaign and the "Commercial Software Initiative."   

The first is the much maligned traditional "don't touch it — we paid for studies to show we're better" sort of marketing program we've all come to know and disregard.  The latter is a program that may or may not be public, but certainly was active two years ago and continued to demonstrate that large amounts of money can be thrown at Things We Don't Understand. 

This was enough to provoke me to post advice for candidates.  You need to interview Microsoft.  You need to request the recruiter get a number of people on your interview loop:

• At the very least request the recruiter get someone from Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA) involved, such as the primary person responsible for "free and open source software" opinions within LCA.  Microsoft still seems to have a fetish and a HUGE misunderstanding about the nature of IP (patents in particular) and open source software.  You can see this in the recent positioning around the Novell Microsoft agreement.  It would be best to understand how this might effect the role you will play.
  
• You want to talk with someone in the Government Engagement team that is responsible for their F/OSS opinions.  Microsoft unfortunately appears to not understand developing country economics.  They think countries are excited to ship hard currency out of their economies to use American technology to develop their own IT industry potential.  Open source wins in these economies against developed nation tech time and again. 
  
• These two organizations don't align necessarily with Bill Hilf's team in a reporting structure. You need to understand the relationship this evangelism position has to any of the other key groups that could drop a public opinion in your path that makes your position untenable. 
• If this evangelism position does NOT report directly into Hilf's organization, request an interview with Bill to understand the relationship if any.  These are the first three groups that occur to me that can effect the evangelist's role.
• When you interview the person that will be your manager, ask for the objectives that would appear on your review for this period so you get a sense of what will be expected of you, and whether or not they're measurable and achievable.  Then  ask to see his/her objectives for the coming year, at least all the non-personal growth or private ones.  All of them.  You need to understand how relevant your position is in the context of your manager's job.  If you don't see a reasonable overlap -- walk away.
• Ask to see any executive Think Week papers from the past three to five years that concern free and open source software.  Sign a non-disclosure agreement if they require it, but get a hold of them and look for Gates's comments on the papers.  Use this as a basis for some of your questions, as well as insight into the exec mind set on the issues.  I submitted two on two different occasions a number of years ago.  I have no idea if they got past the filter system.  I know Hilf has submitted at least one that was reviewed with comments. 
• Determine whether the evangelist position has executive sponsorship.  Bill Hilf explained in the O'Reilly OSCON interview last summer that Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie "support his work", but there's a huge difference between knowledge and support versus active sponsorship.  If there's no direct executive sponsorship for the role, you may discover "evangelist" means "apologist". 

Microsoft remains a company that can gain huge upside with customers by participating and contributing in existing communities, and developing its own.  Open source software is an enormous opportunity for Microsoft to re-invent itself and improve the bottom line.  As long as its executives and managers believe they compete with open source, or that open source is some how the antithesis of intellectual property, or that they need to explain "commercial software" to the global community, an evangelist's position will be uncomfortable to say the least.

When they tell you all the great things they believe, ask for examples of actions that back up those words.  Bill Hilf works very very hard, but there's little to show for his efforts when it comes to open source related action — actual community contribution. (Licenses, blogs, and web sites do not open source software contributions make.)  There's still far too much Fear and Loathing as is apparent in the public statements and lack of credible action. 

Posts, etc. that may give additional insight as you prep:

• Open Standards, IPR and Innovation Conference, Beijing 2006 covers part of the Microsoft perception problem around open source in developing economies.
• Sun and Open Source Java versus the Microsoft .NET Efforts covers some of the misunderstandings and miscommunications across groups within Microsoft and how it effects their "open source" efforts.
• OSCON 2006: IBM, Microsoft, and Open Source Strategy contrasts two large vendors efforts around open source, and the tough position in which Bill Hilf finds himself. 
• Microsoft continues to learn about Open Source: WiX is two years old covers Microsoft's one shining public example of someone that gets it inside.
• Is Microsoft playing well with others? gives more examples of the cross group opinion problems confronting the evangelist.
• Open Source and the New Microsoft Strategy is a perspective on exec sponsorship against the "leaked" Ozzie memos.
• On Why I Left Microsoft
• Or Maybe Microsoft Could Join the Community demonstrates the sort of public statements (from LCA in this case) an evangelist may need to deal with.
• Perspectives on Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative is the O'Reilly article I wrote covering the opportunity and challenges Microsoft has with open source software.  My opinions haven't changed.

Enjoy!   If you have questions after reading your way through, by all means drop me a line.  Or chase down Daniel Robbins.  I have confidence he'll have interesting opinions as well. 

Open Standards, IPR and Innovation Conference, Beijing 2006

The China National Institute of Standardization and Sun Microsystems co-hosted a one day conference on "Open Standards, IPR and Innovation" in Beijing.  I was an invited speaker.  The event's goal was to bring together a set of speakers that would provide different perspectives and practices on how standards and intellectual property rules play together inside and out of China, such that China can determine what will best work for them. 

There is obviously a reasonable amount of tension between a handful of countries and China when it comes to claims of piracy, and as China's economy continues to grow, that tension has broken out in the standards arena as well with competing standards for such things as RFID technology and WiFi complicating the discussion.

The great thing about the conference was that one felt the Chinese speakers and attendees were definitely attending to learn, but it was NOT to learn how to be more "western", but rather to learn so as not to make the same mistakes.  The growing sophistication of business and business practices is palpable in Beijing in general, and definitely present at the conference.

One thing that was also surprisingly apparent was the lack of patience with the multinationals and their pricing, Microsoft in particular.  This was not an undercurrent in the presentations.  It was right out there in the open. 

I remember getting into the debate a few years ago while still at Microsoft.  Some managers took the position that countries like India would obviously want to mimic the  "American" success of companies like Microsoft.  The debate continues along the lines that India would obviously NOT want to use open source software because it's IP hostile, and they really need to build lots of proprietary software businesses because it's a demonstrated way to "make money" and grow the economy.  Of course they would want to do so on a Microsoft software platform.

First, open source software isn't IP hostile.  It depends upon strong IP law.  Second, countries such as India are service-based today, and that means EVERYONE gets to take home some money rather than focusing the wealth in the hands of a few.  (The last thing India wants is a return to the days of the Rajahs with a handful at the top.)  Lastly, (and this is the kicker), when you scale out the amount of economic growth that's taking place in countries such as India and China, the last thing they want to do is ship massive amounts of hard currency OUT of their economy to the U.S. for the privilege of developing software to improve business.  (And Microsoft is a veritable Hoover in its structuring of its subsidiaries.  No amount of in-country R&D re-investment can make up for the amount of money at risk here.)  Open source rules in a case like this.

Leap forward to China.  Same story.  Same debate.  Same mistaken thinking from the Western multinationals that somehow China wants to be like them or worse yet, ship all that money out of the economy (government perspective) or the market (corporate perspective).

I understand a naive Western marketing person's desire to believe that China is their next growth market but they fail to understand the economics involved.  This is why Linux rules here -- the cost of goods sold is significant when you add up the royalty payment times the population of customers.  I have held a Motorola Ming phone.  Developed in China for the Chinese market.  It is the sexiest little piece of hardware on the planet, and incredibly functional.  It's Linux-based. 

Why would Motorola want to send that much money in royalties to Symbian or Microsoft?  Yes, yes, I can hear the "we're so valuable" statements from those marketing managers already.   Frankly, I don't really want to read Word documents on a two inch by three inch screen.  The Ming is a work of art.  But I digress.

Several interesting items came out at the conference:

• China has its own document format standard called UOF.  It is somewhat consistent with ODF.  There is to be a convergence.  I learned at dinner one night that Red Flag has already built UOF support into Red Office, so hopefully the support will rapidly ripple back out through the OpenOffice.org community and the rest of the ODF supporting products will soon support UOF as well.  (Andy Updegrove also attended the conference.  He has made the connections and will hopefully have a proper article on UOF soon on his blog.)
• China is very respectful of IP.  They value patents.  They seem to be uninterested in supporting software patents.  They do however understand how patents might make a mess of the standards world, and are very interested in work like the new ex-ante based IPR policy from VITA.

This was the first event in which I've participated where there was simultaneous translation going on.  My slides needed to be handed in a week in advance such that they could be translated as well.  Wireless handsets were available so you could listen to the translation.  While one screen had the slide in English, the other had the Chinese slide.  Attendees and speakers simply worked in their native language.  It was fascinating to see it all just work.   

I've posted all my photos on flickr from the conference and the conference dinners.  I still need to get some names tagged, but it's a start.  All in all a great conference.  I learned a lot, and it was a privilege to participate.

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Sun and Open Source Java versus the Microsoft .NET Efforts

I attended the small event Sun hosted this evening to talk about the next steps towards an open source Java world.  On hand for the discussion were Sun Software EVP Rich Green, VP of Developer Programs and Products Laurie Tolman, and VP of Mobile and Embedded Systems Alan Brenner.  Dan Farber covers the details well here.

There were generally supportive statements around open sourcing javac and the hotspot VM by the end of year, as well as the JavaME (Mobile Edition).  This is all good.  The web site to follow for the work is http://community.java.net/jdk/opensource/

The interesting thing to watch here is how Sun works this opportunity as it's sort of backwards.  Standards exist to enable multiple implementations.  This is certainly how the JCP has functioned, and the Java certification program protects the brand.  Open source software describes a licensing model that ensures a collaborative community can be developed around a software project, and Sun has a long history of participation in such communities, including its own, so should be able to develop a new community here. 

Historically, standards often arise out of collaborative technology communities, and the shared technology snaps to the standard once created, enabling all the community participants to rapidly develop products.  Here, the development community is coming somewhat out of order, behind the specification, but lets set that aside for a moment.   

So what will open source Java mean?  First remember that this effort has been driven not by Sun, but demanded by the community around Java.  Whether the demands are valid or not, or indeed politically motivated or not, there are still good things to be had from the process. 

Sun has driven the Java standardization process through the JCP for some time and has a strong collaborative community and process, supported by a strong certification and branding program.  (The certification will always protect the brand and expectations of integrity, and Sun needs to finally stop the hand wringing over open source projects "drifting" from the specification.  It doesn't happen in the real world, and it won't happen with Java.) 

Delivering Java technologies as open source still makes sense, however, even if the standard has led the implementation so to speak.

As a primary reference implementation, it will provide the following benefits to the entire Java community, Sun included:

• It will harden the primary implementation for Sun's and the community's benefit.  Allowing others to tinker and explore will find new and interesting problems.  They can be addressed.
• It will enable new innovation.  Many claim Java's day is done.  Allowing new implementors to explore the primary production base will invariably lead to new ideas and innovation on the platform beyond JCP participants, and to everyone's benefit.
• As new code enters the source base, it will likely come in at a very high level of quality.  Even if Sun developers act as the primary committers for the foreseeable future, a high level of inspection will be brought into play on code coming in from the outside.  For new work delivered from the inside, the inspection will likely be equally vigorous from the community.

That is not to say there won't be challenges.  As with any large code base that exists in a commercial product, all will need to be inspected carefully from a number of angles.  Sun won't want any obviously embarrassing code released, but as well, they need to ensure all code licensed in from outside can be released, and manage that process. 

Sun already supports a strong development community around OpenSolaris, and hopefully that experience can be leveraged by the “OpenJava” team.  (Certainly the questions I asked of Sun people tonight indicated the Java folks were absolutely sharing notes with the OpenSolaris community.) 

Likewise, Sun already supports a strong collaborative community in the Java Community Process, so they have a great channel to begin their open source efforts when they figure out how they intend to publish what sources. 

Perhaps it would be better to contrast this against other similar efforts.  Microsoft developed C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR)  of .NET as a product first.  The specification for the C# language, and the Common Language Infrastructure (the CLR plus the base class libraries) was then taken through ECMA International, an industry consortium, to develop a standard, and then through the international standards process at ISO. 

During the same period as the initial standardization, a team at Microsoft created a shared source project around the standard, aka Rotor, providing what was essentially a reference implementation of the standard by cutting down the product code base to the standard.  The project, however, was not open source.  It’s license restricts commercial distribution.  It was essentially developed to drive academic research. 

Neither are changes accepted back from the community around this "Shared Source" project.  The code base is still linked to the product code, and Microsoft has concerns about intellectual property taint.  It’s unfortunate.  One of the first contributions from the outside world, within a day of the initial release of a million lines of code of implementation and test harness, was a fragment of code that improved the just-in-time compiler performance by 10%.  It of course couldn’t be accepted.  Nor the first robust bug fix the was contributed the next day.  The community quickly got the message and stopped contributing. 

A second implementation sprang up after the ECMA standard completed.  The mono project was started by Ximian as a complete ground-up implementation of the ECMA C#/CLI standard, and distributed as open source software under the GPL.  Ximian has been since acquired by Novell. 

Microsoft continues to position mono as “an interesting science experiment” in its market commentary, despite its growing success, and to maintain an arm’s length ambiguity about the state and status of non-essential patents that may be infringed by mono. 

Instead of encouraging multiple implementations of a standard they instigated, they discourage them.  Instead of embracing open source collaborative development, innovation and contribution, they keep the community hobbled.

So Sun has a huge opportunity to “do it right” with Java. They began the release of Java EE 5 with the GlassFish project, and continue the work in the context of a culture shift that has delivered OpenSolaris.  Now time will tell if they can harness all their collective experience in open source software, standards, and the JCP to bring about a complete open source Java world.

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OSCON 2006: IBM, Microsoft, and Open Source Strategy

Bob Sutor gave a fine talk at OSCON 2006 in Portland last week called "The Future of Software is a Blend, but of what?" (slides here).  It was a classic IBM talk.  He developed an architecture of thinking about using free and open source software in the enterprise.  It is obviously a mixed environment between free/open software and closed software.  The additional questions of what is commercial or not and what standards-based software is used opens the discussion into a multi-variable landscape that reflects the real world of most enterprise software architectures.  Of course, when discussing how one might consider these options against closed product decisions, IBM software choices were made. 

Bob's use of language was perfect.  For example, when one needed to "step up to a scalable enterprise database", it was of course DB2.  (Look for the transition between slides 13 and 14.) This is exactly the sort of perfectly pitched rhetoric we've seen from IBM over the years, back through initial engagements with the Apache and Linux communities, and on through the development of the Eclipse community.

Before the reader thinks I'm bashing at IBM, let's look at Microsoft's OSCON 2006 engagement.  Danese Cooper (Intel) interviewed Bill Hilf (Microsoft) during an Executive Briefing session on Tuesday before the main conference opened.  Bill is director of the Microsoft Open Source Lab, and helped create Port25, which is a careful view into Microsoft's Shared Source world similar to Channel9. 

Danese asked lots of difficult questions, and Bill gave lots of pro forma answers that typically involved: "That's a good question." + a restatement of the question + the scripted response from the Rude Q&A + "Microsoft is still learning from the open source community." 

[A Rude Q&A is the document Microsoft teams develop with PR before announcements and events that covers all the questions you DON'T want to be asked by the press and analysts, and what the best response can be.  There is an art to writing these documents and it helps keep the message delivery sharp.]

Danese didn't probe too hard because it would have been impolite to beat up a Silver Sponsor, which is pretty acceptable.  And in Bill's defense, he's worked extremely hard with Jason Matusow this past few years to get the message to the point that the Microsoft executive team isn't still running around offering personal opinions based on conjecture.  So the fact that we didn't learn anything other than the Microsoft rhetoric is being buffed to a very high shine isn't surprising. 

But here's the simple difference between the IBM and Microsoft open source strategies.  IBM participates.  Microsoft talks about "still learning from open source."  Port25 is interesting.  Re-casting and re-branding the plethora of licenses to the few Shared Source licenses is nice.  Cutting a few partnership deals with companies creating products based on open source is just business.  Opening a portal where other people can share code is fine.  But it all pales in comparison to IBM employees' direct and constant participation in project communities around the open source world, including the creation of their own, for what has to be going on eight years. 

Whether it's a lack of executive will, the frenzied fear of IP loss or litigation from Legal Affairs, or the cultural inability to collaborate because of the historical competitive nature of the company, Microsoft professionally talks up a weak story and refuses to actually engage and participate.  Maybe it's just pride (which is really just another word for fear).  IBM's practiced rhetoric is much much more acceptable and credible, because at the end of the day they participate and contribute. IBM deeply understands the competitive advantage and business credibility it brings.

In the end, Microsoft is going to have to DO something. Be Bold.  Contribute.  Participate. Risk something.  At one point in the interview with Danese, Bill said that Gates and Ozzie support his team's work.  There's a huge difference, however, between supporting a mean-well market message and supporting the cultural shift it takes to actively participate. 

Vive la Société libre! [With appropriate apologies to de Gaulle.]

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ODF Acceptance, Microsoft's Big Lie, and a Standards Primer for Berlind

Last week saw some exceptional posting from Andy Updegrove on the "art of the big lie" and messaging battles between vendors supporting the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and Microsoft.  Andy does a fine job of calling the question, and brings an analysis to the story as a standards savvy lawyer that few journalists can in the rush to be "newsworthy".  David Berlind followed up calling the question on ISO and the value of standards in such a market contest between vendors.  Unfortunately, while Berlind's questions are the right ones, he doesn't necessarily have the background in standards to fill in the discussion accurately.  Even Gartner's analysts manage to get it wrong, assuming a 70% probability that ISO will refuse Microsoft's Office XML submission.  Let's set some ground work for the discussion.

ISO develops standards through its committees and working groups.  Member countries form delegations to such groups, through their national standards organizations (BSI, DIN, AFNOR, ANSI, etc.).  Each national group forms opinions and delegations through the participation of "experts" within the country.  A lot of these experts work for the vendors.  So you'll see coverage by large corporations like IBM and Sun by design.  (OASIS and ECMA membership to create the specification,  and then through various different national bodies to help encourage ISO adoption.)

It's a game of technology diplomacy, and in the end, after the dinners and meetings are over, the job is to expand one's area of economic influence and defend sovereign territory.  Microsoft tends to play the game poorly in so far as they don't necessarily invest to the depth that an IBM does in covering the board, nor do they appreciate that a diplomat is ultimately supposed to be invisible.  Fortunately (for the rest of us) they treat it too much like a direct market competition so their actions tend to be highly visible.  Their current standards strategy would tend to be patent focused since they appear to be rather (patent) lawyer heavy in the standards strategy team that is part of Legal and Corporate Affaires.  Again, they don't understand the economic dynamic.

The potential patent problems with Microsoft's proposed standard can't be fought at ISO or ECMA or any other standards development organization for that matter.  Standards and patents are orthogonal.

Standards exist in an economic system to encourage multiple implementations.  Patents exist in the economic system to protect a single implementation.  By definition these tools are focused on different economically conflicting jobs.   This is why every standards development organization needs rules about how to deal with patents.  It's not that they are encouraging the licensing of inbound property, but rather they need a way to handle the discussion of such intellectual property when they discover it in their midst, or to at least best prevent it from causing them grief from their own members by having the discussion up front.  (OASIS does actually have a great IPR policy at this point, because of how it forces the conversation.)  There is no economically feasible way to prevent an outside party with a patent from gumming up the works.

Microsoft will hammer away at their covenant not to sue with respect to patents and their Office XML formats, and ambiguity around which patents are covered under what circumstances.  So they likely can demonstrate to ISO that with their covenant they are well within ISO's IP policy and that this need not be a concern.  (Even the confusion they continue to engender around C#/CLI, patents, and the ECMA specs turned ISO standards, won't be a valuable example because no one could demonstrate that anyone is being hurt or that the confusion is a deliberate strategy.)

Then there's the issue with respect to competing standards. This too is a red herring.

While ISO certainly doesn't like to encourage competing or overlapping standards, they will not necessarily prevent them.  They are a standards development organization in place to ensure that the rules of development are transparent and followed.  It is not their role (nor do you ever want it to be) to manage the marketplace through determining the economic viability of a standard. 

They would be hard pressed to refuse to accept the fast track for the specification Microsoft drives through ECMA based on a scope that says "just like our yet to be delivered product".  That's not to say Sun and IBM participation won't seek to slow it down, and that would be a fine thing, but don't count on blocking the entrance of the standard.

A better way to tackle the problem may be to encourage procurement organizations to consider why they procure to standards.  Such organizations want the competition encouraged by multiple implementations, and the value in the innovation beyond the standard those implementations embody.  This is consistent with the rhetorical line Microsoft started with those same organizations when first realizing open source might threaten their control.  They helped establish the discussion that customers really want to procure against standards. 

But it first requires multiple implementations.

It is a very small step to encourage those agencies in their procurements to consider the measure of a standard's success to be the number of implementations of a standard against which they're procuring that presently exist versus promises from vendors of possible future implementations.  It opens the door for lots of demonstrations of interoperability between products, allowing the customer to make the decision based on other real world factors. 

It forces Microsoft to invest heavily in their relationships with the likes of Corel and Apple to try to cajole and arm twist other implementations of the Microsoft XML formats (which they won't be able to settle until they're ready to ship Office 12) or be caught being the only implementation of their own standard. 

A standard with only one implementation, regardless of the imprimatur of multiple standards organizations, is still a failure. 

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Microsoft continues to learn about Open Source: Wix is two years old!

I was pretty hard on Microsoft with it's open source and standards messaging the other day, and deservedly so if we're talking about their public messages and actions.   But in the background we continue to have great examples for Microsoft to learn from.  I wasn't paying attention to the date (or the blog world enough of late).  Wix is two years old. (Wix is the Windows Installer XML project published on SourceForge under the Common Public License — so yes, Microsoft DOES open source — even if they insist on shades-of-grey marketing calling it shared source.) 

Rob Mensching's entry tells the whole story:

• 30+ Releases
• 215,000+ Downloads
• 630,000+ Project Web Page Views
• 600+ wix-users mailing list members
• 530+ Bugs (480+ Fixed)

And it is essentially a group of Microsoft employees on their own time, with an engaged community of happy Windows developers.  Not only do internal teams use WiX, along with a healthy set of customers, but so do a number of open source products (MySQL first, and now SugarCRM) for their Windows packaging. 

Read his blog entry and see why Rob is a great example of a community leader.  As he says in closing, "I stop and think about where we are at today and I can't help but smile. This is so much fun and I'm definitely looking forward to the next two years."

Excellent work, Rob!

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.   

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How Microsoft Should Have Played the ODF Standards Game

I posted on Microsoft's standards strategy around their Office XML Schema versus the OASIS Open Document Format standard that is well implemented and already on its way to ISO. 

Let's look at the strategy Microsoft should have followed to win this particularly nasty attack on one of their core revenue streams. We will make the following worst case assumptions (from a Microsoft business perspective):

• The market does really believe that Microsoft is over-delivering in the Microsoft Office product suite, triggering a call for standardization. 
• Tightly integrated innovation may not work in this product space as well anymore, unless they can build new complement models around it (e.g. perhaps a play around Sharepoint).
• The OASIS Open Document Format standard has a sufficient head start and real implementations that it really does catch on with customers.

Here's how it should have been done:

• When the OASIS group began Microsoft should have immediately joined and joined in force.  Standards is a game of collaboration and influence and you can't influence if you don't participate. For a multi-billion dollar revenue stream they could afford a little participation.
  
• Dipping a toe in the water here would only let them know what their competitors were doing rather than giving them the ability to effect things.  Microsoft should have had experts (multiple) in the room as "the most knowledgeable people" on the broad subject of document formats for the predominant format in the world. 
• As well they should have been volunteering to host meetings, assume administrative positions, and involve as many liaison points as possible.  (The more external liaison points one can create the slower the process will move.  This is applying Brooks' Law to standards groups.)
• They could have expanded the charter in dire ways to continue the confusion.  Look how long it took to complete the C++ language standard once that working group tried to bite off the entire HP template library as part of the initial work.  I can imagine linking the ODF work to character set specifications in ISO as a way to drag out the format standard discussion for quite some time, especially if cross standards organizational liaison points were set-up.

From this point forward, they would have been able to throttle expectations and directly impact the development process to maintain a core relationship to the evolving specification.  They could have ensured their own format (asset) was protected, but with a clear relationship to the standard maintained.  It would have forced a nasty amount of implementation stress onto the OpenOffice world, and on Sun and IBM by forcing them into co-operation they weren't ready to assume. 

Then when a standard was finally released:

• Immediately claim to be developing a conforming implementation to be released at some appropriate time. The public relations game is very clean.  They have been seen to be contributing all the development cycle.  They sound reasonable in relation to the customer desire to see a standard.  They can continue to advance their own format and innovation, while claiming the check box of conformance.
• Immediately propose the next wave of format standardization to maintain the illusion that the standard isn't yet baked, and could be evolving for some time.

Indeed, even though Microsoft chose not to participate (thereby receiving a nasty surprise when ODF landed in their laps relatively quickly and with apparent customer support), the simplest way to have made the entire "mess" go away would have been to:

• Announce support for the standard in a service pack after Office 12 ships.  It's reasonable to not immediately leap to implement and interrupt the current delivery cycle and no customer would punish them for that delay. 
• It could be dressed in almost identical language about having the superior technology but listening to customers. 
• Indeed they could even position it with existing customers as an archive format rather than a "real" document format. 

While the analysis sounds very sinister, it is actually the way the market place works.  Companies compete.  Standards are a market tool to enable multiple implementations of some functionality allowing competition in the market which lowers prices.  Depending upon the unique needs of customers, they also want solutions to problems.  They're willing to pay a premium for that solution.  That solution often starts as a unique value proposition from a single vendor. There comes a point when the vendor is in a dominant position and the customer wants price competition. And the cycle begins again. 

Standards move the market forward but threaten an incumbent's position.  The incumbent has a responsibility to shareholders to be as profitable as possible delivering new value to customers, but the easiest way for this would be to extend the technology base already in place.  These are the normal stresses in the market system.

The interesting thing is to look back on the number of times a vendor with a single implementation tried to win playing an overlapping standards game.  Looking at the UNIX wars I remember three occasions off the top of my head where this was tried over a long period.

• "tar wars" over archiving formats.
• The GUI Wars where OSF/Motif and Sun's GUI toolkit battled it out.
• The sockets versus streams debate.

In each case, we ended up with two standards being forced upon us.  In each case, the dominant technology that won in the marketplace was the one with the most implementations, with the other withering on the vine. Even when both specifications became required for an implementation to claim conformance to the single standard that included them, customers in the market used the specification which was most widely implemented every time. 

Microsoft chose the wrong strategy here on multiple levels, betting against customers and the market in general. It may buy a bit of time, but will ultimately cost them more in the long run. 

When Standards Collide: Microsoft Office XML and ODF

Lots has been written so far about Microsoft's recent announcement to take its Office 12 XML schema to Ecma International to standardize, and then use Ecma as an avenue to ISO standardization.  Microsoft then offered a "covenant not to sue" implementers of their future standard and this too has been well analyzed.  The best writing on the subject is covered here:

• Andy Updegrove on the covenant compared to Sun's on ODF, and compared to Microsoft's original Office 2003 XML patent licenses . Andy's commentary in this space has been balanced and deep since the discussions began and I would encourage you to track his blog.
• IBM's Bob Sutor has posted several excellent items covering the initial announcement and standards "factoring", as well as regular updates tracking the news and various letters to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  (Bob has also begun podcasting.)
  

The press should not be ignored on this issue and I've put a short summary of links at the end of this item.

I'll take a different focus here.  Let's demonstrate how Microsoft is either naive of the purpose of standards or arrogant in its attitude towards the very process with which they're claiming to engage.   

The interesting thing about this announcement is that clearly Microsoft doesn't understand standards.  Let's go back to first principles on this one. The economic purpose of a standard is to enable multiple implementations. Standards enable product substitutions to be made. As Tim Bray points out, Office represents a huge amount of the profitability of the corporation.  Honestly encouraging multiple implementations is the wrong thing to do from a business perspective.  The Board of Directors should be loudly questioning this strategy if that is Microsoft's intent. 

The reality is probably closer to an arrogance towards standards in general from the perspective of setting them and of their customers' desires to see them in the industry. Rather than implementing the standard that exists, (and we'll discuss in the next post why the PR value of this would have been high, while giving them maximum implementation freedom), they have chosen to try to confuse the market by offering up their own standard. 

They are trying to maintain the aura of standardization, while maintaining maximum control of what they perceive to be their property.  After promising to publish the patent license in the early part of the announcement, it has since turned into a statement that the covenant not to sue implementers on top of the original patent license is all they will be doing.  So the legal ambiguity begins. 

While someone could implement the Microsoft Office XML specification royalty free and without fear of directly being sued because of the covenant, some might not be able to distribute their product because Microsoft's patent license can not be sublicensed and this conflicts with certain free and open source licenses.

This is similar to the sorts of games being played out around C# and the Common Language Infrastructure. Microsoft took these technology specifications through Ecma International as well, who then took them on to ISO for standardization.  Rather than encouraging the one other substantial implementation of these standards beyond Microsoft's .NET platform, it continues a cloud of legal ambiguity around the Novell mono implementation. 

A similar game will be at hand around document format standards if and when the Microsoft Office XML specifications complete the cycle at Ecma International and later at ISO.  In the mean time (2-4 years), they will loudly continue to hammer home that government and enterprise customers should trust them that they're building a standard which will be royalty free to implement.

They will have Jason Matusow front and center on this mission, based on his recent announcement about a move to Microsoft's corporate standards team.  I wish Jason well in his new role, but respect too much his ability to manipulate and frame the language of the debate as he did introducing the term "shared source" into the industry and spending a lot of time with governments, the press, and analysts selling them on the idea that most people didn't care about source code anyway and Microsoft's sharing programs were basically equivalent to free and open source software. For the past couple of years he has been driving home the "move to the middle" message.

A successful standard is measured by the number of implementations.  This is as opposed to a vendor proprietary specification designed to enable multiple complement products but prevent the actual substitution.  If there is only one implementation of a standard then it's an economic failure, regardless of the imprimatur of a standards organization.  Unfortunately in the market, confusion may reign for some time before customers realize the problem. 

Looking at Microsoft's original press release, it would appear that they're positioning the entire move as an archive format.  That is essentially what it will become -- an archive standard -- if they can't generate a serious second implementation.  So customers will be able to work with ODF for all active documents as that standard takes hold with multiple genuine implementations, and customers can still have confidence that during the transition, they will be access the Office 12 documents produced in the interim period. Of course this won't be the way Microsoft will position it going forward.

The number of ways Microsoft is being arrogant here is impressive:

• It's arrogant towards their customers with respect to the needs of the Microsoft business machine versus the needs of the customers. (They could support ODF then demonstrate they really can innovate better solutions in their own products.)
• It's arrogant in its survival instinct around protecting its market position by deliberately sowing confusion around document format standards. ("Our document format is so much better that it should also be a de jure standard so people that want a standards-based implementation can keep buying our one true implementation".)
• It's arrogant towards the very standards processes and partners at Ecma International, the new technical committee, and ISO that Microsoft is proposing it supports.  ("Trust us.  We'll have our proprietary specification through the process in 12 months.  Then ISO can approve it quickly too.")

It's really too bad.  It should have been played out very differently, which we'll look at next. 

The press links:

• CNet (22 Nov 2005) Microsoft's Standardization Move Divides Experts
• ZDnet (22 Nov 2005) Excellent blog entry by David Berlind.
• Nicolas Carr's (22 Nov 2005) Distrust and Verify
• eWeek (22 Nov 2005) From the Outside Looking In: Analysts, Developers on Microsoft, Open Standards
• eWeek (22 Nov 2005) A heated editorial response from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
• Boston Herald (24 Nov 2005) Open Debate Flares: Sun says Microsoft Vows can't Stand the Light
• eWeek (29 Nov 2005) Microsoft Drops the Office Open Standard Ball

Comics used with the kind permission of Tatsuya Ishida.