Microsoft at OSCON conference: controversies from the audience

At OSCON, a top software architect questions Microsoft’s relevance as Linux and open source march on into the enterprise and the overall computing landscape. The article from eWeek.com explains how Brian Aker, director of architecture at Sun Microsystems comment about Microsoft. Aker concluded that "Microsoft is irrelevant", but he did not have a chance to explain himself in what way he meant that to be the case.

I blogged a few days ago about Microsoft's open source efforts led by Sam Ramji who gave a keynote today 25th of July. It is going to be interesting to read what the press is going to conclude of his presentation. Microsoft is learning about open source, there are multiple things happening on that front and Steve Ballmer concluded in his keynote during WPC 2008 in Houston that Open source is something that Microsoft recognizes and want to understand.

In an interview with eWEEK, Ramji cited many of the same issues as Bray, including: Microsoft's work on interoperability with Sun, Novell, IBM and others; the steps Microsoft has taken with its Shared Source effort and more permissive licensing; the work that Ramji's lab has done; and steps like working with the Eclipse Foundation, gaining OSI (Open Source Initiative) license approval, and supporting open-source projects on CodePlex.

Whatever the case in the future, software business models are changing, they are changing dramatically and software entrepreneurs better make sure that they understand the dynamics of what is going on in the marketplace.

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Open Source Software a Security Risk: finally somebody is speaking out

Three month study focuses on 11 open source software packages and each community's response to security issues. The study was carried out by Fortify Software and 11 open source software packages were tested by the community's response to a security risk.

People have the wrong perception of open source: it is free and and will not cost anything. I would claim that this is as true as having free lunches every day at a local Starbucks. There is not such as free software. Even if the software is installed, sooner or later somebody is going to pay for the use of it and I would like to challenge any CIO of this question and scenario:You are happy to take into production a content management system that is completely free and on top of this, there are hundreds of "free" components on the marketplace. You install it, you are very happy to have all of the functionality that you can think of. You are spreading the word to your buddies of the free stuff and then one morning you wake up and get a call that your site has been exploited by hackers. You have scripts in your site that are collecting social security numbers, you have people "taking your role" and people are getting exploited.

But, the site is free, and now you have a problem at your hands. The question is: who do you call? Do you call the CMS vendor or do you call each and every vendor that provides the "free" component. You soon find out that there are NO numbers to call, nobody wants to take the responsiblity, but you have a site that is causing harm. Do you still think it is free?Asssume that you bought the CMS solution from a vendor. The vendor charged for it either on a monthly basis or one time payment. Maybe you even pay this vendor maintenance for situations like this. Now you have somebody to call and somebody that might care about your problem.I think you got the point.

According to CIO.com and the article, this is what they found out:Fortify identified a total of 22,826 cross-site scripting and 15,612 SQL injection issues associated with multiple versions of the 11 open source software packages examined. But when Fortify tried to reach out to the open-source software communities, with the primary point of contact a Web site and a general e-mail address, the security firm found that "in two-thirds of these cases, you didn't get a response at all," West says. "There are no phone numbers. Who do you go to ask for information? It's kind of hard to tell who these people are." The report itself notes, "Open source packages often claim enterprise-class capabilities but are not adopting—or even considering—industry best practices. Only a few open source development teams are moving in the right direction." The reality is that while open source software may appear more cost-effective and just as functional as commercial software in some instances, the question of maintenance must be examined very carefully. "Who do you reach out to?" "What about the thousands of companies out there running Geronimo? And what about your supply-chain partners?"

The question is very obvious. If you are a CIO, you will really have to think twice before you take a leap of faith into running your business using open source. That is my personal opinion and that is why I run my applications using software from companies that care.

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SAP: Oracle Software Support from TomorrowNow to End: another example of failed business model

SAP will close TomorrowNow, its money-losing third-party maintenance provider of Oracle applications that is the subject of a nasty court battle, on Oct. 31, 2008. What are the implications for third-party maintenance? I have blogged multiple times of the changes that are taking place in the software markets. SAP bought TomorrowNow with big fanfare to only realize that it was a big mistake. They even tried to sell the company but with the federal lawsuit in San Francisco filed by Oracle did not make TomorrowNow as a good target for acquistion. What is sad about this story is that 225 customers need to have some place to go with their Oracle support and I am sure most of them have been already been contacted to offer help. From a research perspective, this is a classic example of a failed business model and acquisition with customers being hurt in the end of the day.

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VMware To Give Away Hypervisor: The battle has begun of virtulization dominance

VMware has launched its first counter-attack to Microsoft's pricing structure for its virtualization products, announcing that ESXi, its lightweight hypervisor, is going to be given away for free. The market is full of confusion and questions asked why the former CEO and founder Diane Greene resigned and moved on even if the growth of WMWare is almost 50% for this year. Furthermore, the new CEO Paul Maritz has announced ESXi, its lightweight hypervisor to be free of charge.

When I look back 20 years in this software and IT business, I have to say that the change in the business models is not gradual, it is almost like tsunami, where things change in a profound way without a return back. WMWare has been the king on the hill for long and now with the market gorilla Microsoft with its own almost free virtualization software product, the game has changed forever. WMWare will not be the same ever more. There might not be too much change in the next few months, but a year or two years from now, you will see what really happened.

Based on the Redmond Channel News, Maritz has already put spending freeze of hiring, except for strategic positions. We all know what that means in the long run. However, change is good, change is healthy and change could also mean success in the long run. Humans are lazy for change and this will force WMWare to innovarte and find new business models.

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Q&A with Shaun Walker: Welcome to Bat Country and the story of DotNetNuke

Very interesting interview of Shaun Walker, the creator of the popular DotNetNuke open source Web application framework for .NET. The story is very compelling to read. Shaun Walker, the creator of DotNetNuke shares his history with Microsoft and how the company supports and ignores his efforts. Some divisions, such as Microsoft's .NET Developer Division (DevDiv) with Scott Guthrie has supported DotNetNuke concept for years. However, what is very interesting is that Microsoft has its own Open Source Software Lab group (run by Sam Ramji) as a marketing division for OSS software development. This group, however, has pretty much ignored DotNetNuke even if it is purely Microsoft and runs only in Microsoft environments including SQL Server. But like with any large organization, there are parts of the organization that support you and part that completely ignores you. This is the learning that one needs to take from the Q&A from Redmond Developer News.

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Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Due in August: even more extended business intelligence engine

CEO Steve Ballmer lays out Microsoft’s Software plus Services strategy at the Microsoft partner show and announced that Microsoft is due to have Microsoft SQL Server 2008 out in August. Ballmer concludes in his speech for business partners in Houston that Microsoft has sold 140 million Vista licenses and gained 100 millon SharePoint users. Furthermore, Microsoft has replaced 4.7 Lotus Notes seats. Microsoft is moving towards the cloud and my company is a very good example of a company that does not have servers at all. We live in a virtual world and I just retired our last Dell server a couple of months ago with a fanfare. All of our business is in the cloud, everything from accounting, collaboration, email telephony. This is a real true wake-up call for traditional Microsoft Classic partners. Get on the bandwagon of cloud computing or face the instinction in the long run.

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Microsoft`s Ballmer Opens Up to Partners: I was in Houston as participant of Microsoft WPC 2008

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer offers up a lively Q&A for partners on issues ranging from Yahoo to open-source software. Recently, the press has been questioning Microsoft's role in the open source field, but Steve Ballmer's keynote clarified some how Microsoft sees open source. Based on the article from eWeek.com, Steve Ballmer quoted as follows:

"So we're going to encourage open-source innovation on our platforms, and around our platforms. And, you know, we see interesting things where bits and pieces of technology, commercial companies are now starting to provide it in an open-source form or to digest in an open-source form. And we're open to that as well. But our fundamental business model will remain kind of commercial software, advertising, enterprise licensing, etc."

Unfortunately, there is still lots of misunderstanding in open source and what it can do for entrepreneurs and end user clients. What I will say is what my father taught me long time ago: there is nothing such as "free lunches".

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Oslo: Road to Microsoft's Cloud: is modeling ready for a larger audience of software engineers?

The road to Microsoft’s Cloud computing environment runs through “Oslo,” the company’s software modeling initiative, but there will be other stops along the way. Steven Martin from Microsoft (senior director of product management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division) explains pretty nicely the misconceptions about modeling and what he feels is going to have to happen in the future.

It is clear to me that software development community will have to take modeling into consideration once again. I have to say that we have failed to deliver on the promises of UML and I am speaking about this with experience of having run development teams in the past. UML is very generic and the notation tries to solve the problems of the whole world and not any given domain like domain-specific modeling (DSM) does. However, based on the article in the eWeek.com, it looks like Microsoft is on the path of creating a modeling environment that is not just models, but executable as well. The reasoning for this is based on an interview of Steven Martin as follows: 

"We have a vision of making model-driven development a mainstream part of application development," Martin said. "To do this we are building a general purpose modeling platform, where we take models out of silos and into a shared representation that can define an end-to-end application."

Also, Microsoft is going to enable third-party developers to integrate with Microsoft model repository and Microsoft is working on a new declarative language that provides developers with an approachable, textual format for authoring models. "This language will also provide deep integration with repository to enable easy import/export of models with the repository, and support interoperability of models between tools and domain specific modeling notations, Steven Martin states." 

And finally, Martin concludes that "that in addition to these innovations that enhance the design-time processes, "we’re also making sure the models are executable -– this is where we deliver true business agility, since the behavior of the running application can be updated simply by updating the models stored in the repository. Models will no longer just describe the application; they will actually be the application. I like to refer to this as sending the model to the server, not the printer…”

I have to say, that it is about time that we get more productivity to software development and the new cloud computing with software assets in the cloud, makes modeling again a must that can not be ignored by software developers, software development tool vendors and also schools that educate new software engineering students.

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The Future State of the CRM Market

Tough economic times for North American enterprises will create uncertain, challenging environments for corporate CRM systems, according to an AMR Research report. Here's what you need to know about the CRM market and the vendors who will be left standing in 2012. The market is very interesting at the moment with lots of companies moving into software-as-service environments. This market will continue to grow and niche players will be able to compete in selected verticals. It is about the value that the vendor can provide to the end user organization.

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Microsoft Acquires MobiComp: got to love the competition

The new deal expands Microsoft's mobile platform to include backup services focused on social networks.Microsoft continued to expand its mobile portfolio June 26 with its acquisition of MobiComp, an open-source cloud computing company that specializes in storage, backup and restoration of mobile data. Microsoft declined to reveal the financial terms of the deal. What makes this acquistion interesting is the fact that the company is based on Braga, Portugal and according to eWeek.com, the company is bought due to the strong skills in research. Whatever the cause, the competition in mobility is heating up with Nokia taking over Symbian and others also trying to figure out how to be part of the competition. I love this type of market evolvement.

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Ten Blogs You Should Be Reading DAILY

The countless amount of blogs in the cyberspace makes our lives difficult but PCMag.com has listed the top then that everybody should track on a regular basis. We live in a world with too many blogs and news channels and we try to find ways to list them in a way that we can track the most important newsfeeds of choice. I used del.icio.us as of source to make sure I remember sites, but I am sure there are many others that people use. Regardless, we have our own choices and the list of 10 blogging sites from PCMag.com is just one view of one editor.

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