Microsoft’s president Brad Smith, this week:
“Microsoft,” said Smith during a chat hosted by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), “was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century and I can say that about me personally.”
Eighteen years ago, I wrote a rebuttal to an article that argued against (!) the use of open source software in government departments in India. That article was written by Microsoft’s then-head of marketing.
At times, it stretched one’s imagination a bit:
[Open Source’s] role in discouraging the development of commercial software threatens to undermine intellectual property, stifle innovation, and limit entrepreneurism while reducing choice in the market.
It questioned the security of open source software in general:
Moreover, once free software is installed, it also becomes a source of elevated security vulnerabilities for IT buyers, because the source code is freely available: no one person is responsible for it.
and ended with this flourish:
We believe that software has commercial value and attempts to render software free will ultimately undermine the software industry, causing less R&D to go into software development and ultimately less innovation for consumers.
It incensed me as a teenager then, and it amuses me now in my thirties. Revisiting this, it’s clear how spooked Microsoft was even then about Linux in particular and open source in general.
Microsoft’s nightmare of Linux on every desktop never came to pass. And yet they were right to have been fearful, because they came very close to irrelevance. What happened to Microsoft is a classice example of how disruption is rarely just a better version of your product, it’s something else altogether.
In Microsoft’s case, the operating system has mattered less after consumer and enterprise applications moved to the web – Salesforce was probably the first major ‘cloud’ enterprise application and Gmail the first major consumer one (notwithstanding that webmail including MS’s own Hotmail existed before – Gmail changed email forever). Developers were now building for the web, both on the front and back ends, not for the desktop.
And then in 2007 the desktop ceased to matter. First with the iPhone and then with Android, one based on UNIX and the other on Linux, people’s primary computer completely changed. With that, Microsoft’s dominance in browsers was wiped out. Its search engine Bing, built into Internet Explorer, mattered little after Chrome and Safari were baked into these new computers, both defaulting to Google’s search. Microsoft’s already diminishing hold on application developers crumbled as people built apps for these new ‘smartphones’ and listed them on closed ‘app stores’, out of Microsoft’s influence.
In response, Microsoft skated to where the puck was with Windows Mobile, but even then found that its primary distribution channel for Windows and Office, the enterprise, didn’t matter in the new world. Phone manufacturers had either begun to build their own OSes in response – Bada at Samsung. LG’s acquisition of webOS from HP. So it bought its way into a new distribution world buy buying the dominant smartphone maker of the previous decade, Nokia. But it was much too late. Apple soaked up the profits and Android the volume – a year ago, the latter reported 2.5 billion monthly active users. Microsoft, once with a 90%+ share of the operating system market, claimed 1.5 billion ‘active’ devices in October 2019.
Linux, in the end, won. But not open source. And not Microsoft.