Microsoft dominates enterprise IT and likely will for a long time. But the software giant is struggling to match the nimble pace of open source on the Web, a pace being set by Google and others.
Microsoft digs into PHP
As but one example, Microsoft\'s Internet Explorer lost market share to Mozilla Firefox in September. To compete effectively on the Web, Microsoft will have no choice but fight open-source fire with fire.
This isn\'t about a need to appease the proverbial \"community.\" It\'s about broad-based development, low-cost distribution, and, frankly, revitalizing its brand with developers.
Google gets this. While Google has long embraced open source like Linux and MySQL to give it flexible, low-cost technology with which to scale out its operations, the company has dramatically increased its open-source developer outreach in the past two years. And while some companies dribble out open source at the edge of their operations, Google is releasing core software like Wave and Android for open-source communities to help develop and shape.
The result? A loud and loyal following. Google may not get much in the way of quality external contributions from these efforts (It\'s still too early to tell.) But the strategy is already paying for itself in terms of marketing, if nothing else.
Hence, while Microsoft\'s mobile software has stalled for years and recently dropped to 4 percent, according to CNET\'s report on recent AdMob data, Google Android jumped from 2 percent to 7 percent in just six months.
That\'s the power of community.
It\'s a community that Microsoft arguably has in the enterprise, but which it emphatically lacks on the Web. Facebook-style developers simply don\'t think of coding in Microsoft\'s .Net. They write LAMP applications. To match this, Microsoft is going to need to join the open-source party.
Microsoft is slowly getting the message. For example, the company has been optimizing Web technology like open-source PHP to run well on Windows. More interestingly, Microsoft\'s experimental Barrelfish multicore operating system has been released under a highly permissive BSD-style open-source license.
The use of a BSD-style license suggests Microsoft is serious about adoption of the project, and of generating trust with developers. Developers can take BSD-style code and do pretty much whatever they want with it, with no permission required and no oversight exercised by Microsoft. It\'s a great move.
Microsoft\'s Open Source Technology Center used to make news by partnering with SugarCRM, MySQL, and other commercial open-source projects. Those partnerships seem to have hit a dry spell over the past two years, with little in the way of new announcements, but this doesn\'t mean that Microsoft\'s OSTC has been inactive.
Quite the contrary. As its work with the PHP community suggest, the OSTC has actually been in overdrive. In an interview with the PHP Classes blog, Microsoft gives some background as to the motivations behind its work with the scripting language:
Open-source initiatives at Microsoft are important to the open-source community because they give developers greater exposure for their products through access to a broadly adopted platform....The (open-source development and interoperability) initiatives are important because they break down barriers between proprietary and open-source developers allowing them to benefit from each other\'s work.
All of these points apply to the PHP community. In the past year, we\'ve demonstrated significant performance improvements on Windows, making PHP applications more attractive to Windows customers. The (Internet Information Services) team created the FastCGI module to implement process persistence and better manage non-thread-safe applications. And the SQL Server team has created a PHP driver providing access to database services on Windows.
Microsoft engineers and contractors have made contributions to the PHP run-time engine and to PHP application projects. And communication between Microsoft; commercial open-source-based companies including Zend, OmniTI, and iBuildings; and open-source developers has broadened significantly.
In other words, both the PHP community and Microsoft benefit from this interoperability development.
However, what remains unsaid in this commentary is perhaps Microsoft\'s biggest benefit by tying into PHP: enhanced relevance in the Web world, in which it\'s trying to compete. The Web is largely built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP-Perl-Python) stack today. For Microsoft to win on the Web, it must engage PHP, however much it might want the world to beat a path to its .Net door.
In a separate but related initiative, Microsoft\'s Silverlight is going head-to-head with Adobe Systems\' Flash with Web design developers, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported.
But that\'s only part of the Web battle. Web scripting languages like PHP have been heavily influential in developing the Web, and today, PHP and its clan are largely hardwired for MySQL, not Microsoft\'s SQL Server.
Microsoft\'s OSTC is helping change this by engaging the PHP community. In discussions with various Microsoft executives, I\'ve heard that this work is not fully appreciated (yet) within Microsoft, but I suspect that Microsoft will come to significantly appreciate the work that its OSTC has been doing for it, both within the PHP community and in other open-source communities.
