Microsoft Keeps Eye on Open-Source Prize

Rob writes to tell us that at the recent Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Microsoft's director of platform technology strategy, Bill Hilf, outlined why Microsoft is staying involved with open source. From the article: "Challenges of working [coopetively] in the open-source space include the balance between competing and cooperating with a rival, he said. Perception also is a 'big' challenge for the software giant. 'In many regards, the Microsoft open-source story lends itself to a great metaphor of David and Goliath,' he said. 'That is a challenge over perception.'"

Coopetition

[Tx]

Coopetition, or simultaneously cooperating and competing with rivals, has long been Microsoft's broader business strategy.

So that's what they call it. Translating the doublespeak, is that a euphemism for "Buying the companies whose IP you need, and crushing everyone else" perchance?

Enemies

[RootsLINUX]

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer."

Re:Coopetition

[Kijori]

No, I think it means pretending to cooperate and then forcing them out of business - a euphemism for 'embrace and extend'.

Is this a case of david defeating the goliath

[ravee]

Ultimately, Microsoft is coming round to the fact that it cannot write away the open source movement. There is a very popular saying : If a group of weak sticks are bound together, the combined strength can be even more than a single stout stick.

GNU/Linux and Open Source softwares are like the multiple weak sticks which have come together to become very strong. And microsoft is realising that it is not going to be a cake walk any longer.

The end users are the one who are going to benefit from the whole thing.

Re:Error in title, please fix

[NutscrapeSucks]

Back in 1998/1999, MS was telling everybody that OSS would never compete against MS

I would argue that's still the case. OSS (and by that you mean Linux) has targeted the traditional Unix market and done very little to compete with Microsoft's installed base. So, MS lost a huge growth opportunity with all those 'obsolete' Unix/RISC servers going away, but has done very well growing their natural base of desktops/groupware/file+print/intranet despite Linux.

Re:PR

[truthsearch]

It's just pathetic to think Microsoft's business tactics have changed since 1992.

What did anyone expect?

[ninja_assault_kitten]

MS to stick their head in the sand and hope OSS will go away? "Know your enemy better than you know yourself."

IBM?

[CSHARP123]

Microsoft views open source through the lens of "coopetition from commercial and open-source strategies at the same time," Hilf said.
MS had always competed with IBM. IBM is seen has very good to Open source. IBM still makes profit benefiting from open source. MS may be thinking along the same lines and I think they are not able to come up with a viable business plan of how to make use of open source movement that do not hurt their bottomline of MS OS and MS Office.

ms is already open

[Anonymous Coward]

did anyone happen to notice the entire .net framework is easily readable?  reflector anyone?  what wasn't leads right down to win32 and most of that was already leaked a few years ago.  jeez guys its just code no magic here we've all seen it all.  besides they have done more complete api's, sdk's and documentation than anyone else can manage.

they don't go out of there way to make it hard to develop on there platforms or they'd just be another mac and you wouldn't even care to flame them on there software pratices.  fear is a powerful force.

Re:On target

[mqj]

I didn't think you could fit chairs into a rifle.

Re:The only reason MS is interested

[just_another_sean]

Ha, if the EU wants decent specs and someone who understands how SMB actually works they better look to someone else besides MS [samba.org].

MS in Open source ;-)

[coastin]

There's also the problem of the "observer effect," which is potentially changing an environment being part of it. "This is the important part for Microsoft," he said. "We have an impact from what people call the ripple effect ... What would actually happen if we were in that environment?"

You'd really mess it up comes to mind!

One of the things MS fails to see is that the Open Source movement has lit a fire under the whole computing industry and opened doors for many who have great ideas. The part I like best about the open source movement is the rush of new talent on the scene that would otherwise be stuck in a very Orwellian state if it had not been set free.

MS seems to be facing quite a dilemma where they have to be very careful to not make too much sense when addressing open source, much like a politician who has to gain the confidence of those he will later betray for money over principles. This may explain why a smart, educated man would sound so illiterate and senseless while addressing the open source supporters in the room. Surely, ramblings like we see in TFA must be absent when he reports back to HQ. Otherwise, I would be compelled to warn all MS employees not to drink the water at the office.

Re:ms is already open

[Anonymous Coward]

Okey dokey then. Where are the specs for NTFS so that I (as a Microsoft customer) can use another OS to mount a Windows drive and access MY data?

Perhaps you should explain your definition of 'open' and we will gladly point out where that differs from both the dictionary definition and common usage of the word.

big companies love open source

[DeveloperAdvantage]

Of course Microsoft will keep an eye on open source. I think open source is of huge benefit to large commercial software companies. Here's why.

The open source movement provides a huge ecosystem of software projects which a large company like Microsoft can monitor. When a large company sees a successful open source project, they know there is value to what the project is doing. A level of demand is thus established. Then, they can do some research and try determine whether or not there is a successful business model which can be built around the project, i.e., whether or not the project can be made to generate cash. If it can, then they can decide an appropriate strategy to profit from it, either through purchasing the company or its talent, or simply duplicating the company's work.

There are few other industries where so many talented people are willing to work for free.

Re:talk about flipping a metaphor!

[gavri]

I actually thought Bill Hilf was suggesting that the popular perception was that Open Source is David (The Good Guys) and Microsoft is Goliath (The Bad Guys) and their challenge is to change this perception.
Now I'm not sure.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[twitter]

The whole perception modification thing has problems, despite massive effort, because people have memories. They can run all the adverts of happy teachers they want, people remember them suing public school systems because teachers coppied a text editor [linuxtoday.com]. Attempts to kiss up to "open source" developers simmilarly fail over when they turn aroung and pull an SCO. Their current business model requires exclusion of the, "what's your's is ours and what's ours is ours," kind. By this point, the only reason any one in tech has any empathy for M$ can only be explained in terms of hostage snydrome [google.com].

Re:The only reason MS is interested

[CodeBuster]

Perhaps there is another reason why they were so reluctant to release any documentation or specification...because there is none. I have seen many times now in my software career proprietary pieces of code that have been running for years using an unknown binary protocol amongst themselves that was written by one or two developers who worked for the company in question years ago and never wrote anything down. Nobody even realized this was a problem until there were change requests that could not be made because the expertise to complete the requests had long since moved on. It has been my experience that written documentation is the exception rather than the rule in closed source projects. In fact, the only documentation that is guaranteed to exist is the original source code and sometimes even that cannot be found.