"We are not anti-open source," says Martin Taylor,
Microsoft's general manager of competitive strategy. In fact, he
makes a point of hiring people with Linux and open source skills
for his R&D team and Linux lab.
Earlier this year, for example, he hired Daniel Robbins, former
chief architect of the Gentoo distribution of Linux. His team is
also trying to "forge good partnerships" with open source
suppliers, such as Microsoft's recent deal with JBoss. Taylor has
even given an interview to Linux developers website Slashdot.
Of course, he is not promoting Linux. Taylor is making the
effort to "know his enemy", and find its weak points. He talks to
customers about why they might choose open source instead of
Microsoft software, tests the main scenarios in the lab, and gets
Microsoft's programmers or partners to try to fix the
deficiencies.
Examples include making it easier to set up a Windows web
server, and high-performance computing, where Taylor admits
Microsoft has not done a good enough job.
But there is another aspect: trying to harness the power of open
source as "an alternative development model". JBoss, for example,
has an open source ideology, but Taylor wants to find ways to
optimise JBoss for Windows. "[JBoss CEO] Marc Fleury says half his
customers are on Windows, and financially, he does better out of
them," says Taylor.
"People like to pit this as an either/or binary choice between
open source and Windows. But if you look at the projects on
SourceForge [an open source developers website], an astonishing
number are on Windows."
One of Windows' main attractions is its ability to run tens of
thousands of programs, the vast majority of which have been
developed outside Microsoft. The company does not want to see tens
of thousands of programs that do not run on Windows, even if some
of them compete with Microsoft products.
But that is not the future. Taylor quotes his boss, Steve
Ballmer, talking about Microsoft winning on the desktop and on the
server: the next task is to win on the web.
"We are talking about delivering software as a service: how do
we deliver value from the cloud? This is not the hosted, or ASP,
model, it is delivering a set of services that people might want to
use," he says.
Examples include the FrontBridge anti-spam and mail management
service, which Microsoft has bought, and the Windows Update
patching service.
"Internally, we have got a strategy for all of our products of
how we deliver value to customers via the cloud. Stage two is how
we monetise that value," says Taylor. "If we are number one on
delivering that value and delivering customer satisfaction, that is
a good definition of winning."
l Jack Schofield is computer editor at The Guardian