How Employees Inside Microsoft Are Changing The Company From Within
Sam Ramji, Senior Director of Strategic Platforms at Microsoft, said some pretty unexpected things during his interview on my podcast this week. I’ve gone back and listened to the interview with Sam several times, each time picking up a new little tidbit, but also re-enforcing what I heard him say about open source, hybrid and mixed stacks, and heterogeneity. At least in Sam’s case, we’re hearing things I thought I’d never hear from good old proprietary Microsoft. Since Microsoft became the dominant Microsoft, you would have thought no one in Redmond, Seattle and possibly the entire Washington state had ever heard of or used an operating system other than Windows. That was certainly true of the Gate’s philosophy era.Here are some of the comments Sam made that I’m talking about which I cherry picked from the interview.
We see open source as an unstoppable phenomenon… embraced by developers across the world…
It’s our job to make sure that we’re a great platform for open source
Microsoft now acknowledges that heterogeneity in the enterprise is a business reality… mixed stacks… java and dot net… those things all have to work well if we’re going to save customers money.
We’re seeing that openness to open source is increasingly becoming part of the engineering DNA across the company [Microsoft]…
More and more people joining the company, bringing a wealth of industry experience and a blend of open source and proprietary experience…
Naturally you have to ask two questions about all this: How big are the changes we’re seeing in Microsoft or is a short lived transformation? and… What’s causing this slow but significant shift in Microsoft about open source and hybrid customer environments?Only time can really answer the first question. If the economy were to suddenly return, our Windows 7 sales knocks it out of the part, raising Microsoft’s declines in revenues, will pull out of the current slow battleship turn to go back to the old “everything is Windows” behavior.But the second question, the “what’s causing this” question is one I think we can address. The last ten or fifteen years has created an entire generation of computer professionals who have both seen the rise of open source, and used it themselves. One by one, people with those experiences had to at some point make their way into Microsoft including some who would take on various leadership roles in the company. Like bringing freedom to eastern Europe, at some point enough of a critical mass begins to influence the current culture that you see little breaks from the old ideas of anti-open source and heterogeneous customer environments.The other factor is Microsoft’s declining economic performance. Not that Microsoft is going away any time soon, but the significant declines in revenue and lack of stock price performance have got to send some shockwaves through a company who has largely only lived with very positive economic performance.We’re beginning to see those influences. In things like Sam’s statements about referring to open source as unstoppable, publically acknowledging that many customers’ operate their business in a heterogeneous world, and in actions like Microsoft’s Linux driver GPL contribution. We also see these shifts in products. SharePoint for example is friendly not only to Internet Explorer, but supports and continues to improve its support for Firefox and Opera (though Google Chrome is still an outlier because of Google’s competitive threats.) Office 2010 web apps are expected to be browser friendly as well. System Center Virtual Machine Manager can manage not just Hyper-V but also VMware environments. And Silverlight is working very hard to be cross-platform with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows compatibility. Those are a few of the examples. They tell me that Microsoft has started listening to how customers need Microsoft to work for them, rather than Redmond tell us how we’ll use Windows. It’s also means Microsoft can’t just simply ignore competitive threats and the pervasive use of open source.Once the camel’s nose was under the tent, some change was and is probably inevitable. And we’ll see more changes, albeit gradual, as more and more of those people rise through the ranks of Microsoft, influencing and changing the thinking and culture at Microsoft.
Now, no company is going to suddenly do a 180 degree about face and go from propriety software to issuing their own products under the GPL, but we’re hearing some mighty unfamiliar language coming from Microsoft about open source and heterogeneous environments these days.
Like this? Here are some of Mitchell’s recent posts.
Recent Podcasts:
- The Hidden Cost of Out-of-Cycle Security Patches
- Apple Tablet – Expensive Netbook or iTouch on Steroids?
- Microsoft… Coming to a New Store Near You
- Did Microsoft Violate the GPL and Were They Forced To Make Linux Hyper-V Drivers GPL?
- The Moment of Truth Nears For Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
- Is SharePoint great for external community building?
- Podcast: Xobni’s New Quest. Revenue.
Great Beginning and Intermediate Books Mitchell Recommends:
- Sam Ramji, Microsoft. Why Microsoft contributed to open source.
- Matt Brezina, Xobni. Xobni’s quest for revenue
Also visit Mitchell’s other blogs and podcasts:
- Beginning SharePoint 2007
- Beginning SharePoint 2007 Administration: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition
- Beginning C# 3.0: An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
- Programming .NET 3.5
Visit Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, opinion from around the Web. Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)
