SteveStreeting.com

Note: I’m going to pick the way I discuss this carefully, since I have a good friend on the LINQ to SQL team (yes, we Guernseymen do get around) and I feel bad to criticise too much in this area; nevertheless I think there are lessons to be learned and I have a definite angle on this, being an ex-business coder and open source enthusiast. My thoughts here reflect pretty much what I’ve already suggested on his blog, but in more detail, so hopefully this won’t offend him!

LINQ was a new feature introduced with Visual Studio 2008, and LINQ to SQL is the lightweight SQL Server implementation. News broke recently that Microsoft have decided to concentrate on the larger and more ‘complete’ Entity Framework instead, and encourage people to move to that for their more advanced needs rather than continuing to expand L2S. They’re not dropping L2S, it’s essentially being ring-fenced on a feature basis and will continue to be supported by the team. However, many people are reading between the lines and assuming that, in practice, LINQ to SQL is now a dead-end, and many of them are very upset about that, having invested development time in adopting it, and who were expecting it to continue evolving.

I can see both sides of this - MS need to have a strategy, they have finite resources, and they feel focussing on EF is the best way forward. However if you’ve adopted technology, and invested your own time in it, you want that investment to be strategically valid. While L2S isn’t being dropped, it is unlikely to escape the perception of being ‘on the bone pile’ if the strategy is to expand & promote EF as the preferred solution in future. When updates to a technology you’ve invested in are wholely controlled by one company, and that company decides it no longer wants to make it the core of their strategy, you basically have to suck it up and accept that. The problem here is that producers and consumers of the technology don’t necessarily agree on the best way forward, so bad feeling is the result.

It really doesn’t have to be this way though. What if Microsoft, on deciding that they wanted to focus on EF, released L2SQL as open source instead? Maybe it isn’t strategically core for them anymore, but those who have invested heavily in it already are bound to feel differently. Popular technologies (and I would venture that L2SQL is probably very popular due to its power & simplicity) tend to foster their own communities, and even if only 1% of the developers using it would actually become contributors to it, that’s still probably more people that Microsoft would want to dedicate to the effort from an internal team over the long term.

I’m not even sure what MS would lose from doing that - the technology is free already, so it’s not a revenue generator for them, and it would do wonders for community relations. What they would lose is control, which is perhaps what they’re afraid of - maybe that they’d have to compete with an open source L2SQL - but competition is good for customers. I get the impression from my MS contacts that they feel it’s not viable, that people wouldn’t want it to be open source, that they like the simple, spoon-fed, ‘MS knows best’ approach - but personally I’d say the existence of the Mono project is an indication that this isn’t doing the community justice. I think this poor view of the community model is formed because the open source communities around extending MS products tend to be much, much smaller than those elsewhere (like Java, Linux, Apache etc), but I’d counter that that’s precisely because of the tone that MS sets; ie that you dance to their tune. Environments that are open to more extensive external involvement tend to attract more active contributors, so saying there wouldn’t be enough people when you’re operating in a closed way is actually a self-fulfilling argument.

In the days of the ‘new open Microsoft’, I can’t see a downside to them open sourcing key parts of their framework in practice. Developers these days are a lot more savvy than 5-10 years ago about how they spend their time, and open source is winning a lot of favour not because it’s free, and not always because it’s cross-platform, but because it’s open, and cannot be taken away from them. A number of my customers use Ogre specifically because they’ve been with proprietary systems in the past, which have fallen victim to the companies controlling them deciding they didn’t want to support them anymore, or didn’t want to take them in the direction the customer wanted, or wanted to force them to move to something else when they didn’t want to - and they found themselves restricted / railroaded by a system they’d invested a lot of their own development money in.

Open source for these people means ‘taking the chains off’ - they know that no matter what, there’s no one company that can tell them what to do with their own investment. They’ll stay on the main track while it’s beneficial to them, they can benefit from the core development just like proprietary software customers can, but if at any point they disagree with the ‘central’ decisions, they can do what the like. That’s a very powerful insurance policy in development circles, something I hear time and again from customers as a major positive, and personally I think Microsoft needs to think about that more. They are very much still in the ‘producer/consumer’ mindset (or ‘cathedral’ if you will), but the world around them is rapidly changing to a model of iteration, collaboration, and distributed control. Fewer and fewer customers like to be dictated to by a central oligarchy anymore, and many are going to places they feel more empowered - which is usually the open source camp. Microsoft simply cannot afford to ignore this for much longer.

I don’t know if they’re actually airing these adverts Stateside, or whether they’re a web-only phenomenon for the moment, but Penny Arcade drew my attention to them today. Colour me unimpressed. If the intention was to shake off Vista’s sales blues, or to generally ‘connect’ with the wider consumer in a way that Apple does so well but Microsoft almost never does, but I’d have to classify this effort as a failure of sizable proportions.

Maybe it’s me; maybe I just don’t ‘get’ Seinfeld-style humour, or maybe it’s that Bill Gates really doesn’t remotely inspire or entertain me (making skiploads of cash every nanosecond might inspire some people to revere him, but not me). From my perspective though this is a fairly poor attempt at deadpan humour which leaves me with an impression of Gates being even more of an arrogant but incredibly dull grey suit than I thought before. Worse - it seems his thinking is that acting like a dull grey suit in wacky surroundings will somehow make him endearing and amusing, which couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s equivalent to your Uncle Henry who, despite bearing an unnatural affinity with tweed, thinks he can transform into John Travolta when he hits the wedding reception dance floor. Deeply painful to watch.

Tip to Microsoft - if you want endearing consumer-friendly ads, write Gates out of the script next time, he’s a dead weight.

*edit: I know this is old news but I’m behind a little, very busy lately!

More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:

US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way - I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.

Time to stop this nonsense. Now.

Some people think I bash Microsoft a lot on this blog, and maybe that’s true, but I don’t think I ever do it unfairly. To prove that I don’t just comment on the bad stuff, here’s a major piece of positive news about the software behemoth: Microsoft appears to have fixed the flaws in the Open Specification Promise (OSP).

The major flaw in the OSP when it was originally announced is that the promise not to sue people who developed upon or used Microsoft protocols and formats extended only to those who operated non-commercially. This of course made the whole OSP basically useless, because the primary area where people want to inter-operate with Microsoft is in the enterprise, where, rather unfortunately, most companies do not work for free. Most enterprises are not particularly happy about engaging the services of purely voluntary organisations, at least in visible or critical areas, because of the potential exposure to core business functions; they need support contracts, even if in practice they don’t strictly need or use them - I’m sure that I’m not the only person at the sharp end of getting problems resolved who ended up getting good answers faster from nonprofit communities rather than official support channels.

Anyway, all of a sudden and with little fanfare Microsoft appears to have addressed this; on Friday they updated the OSP to remove the non-commercial clause. The surprising bit is perhaps not that they realised it was broken (I’m sure the beleaguered pro-open source elements in the company knew this from the start), but that the upper echelons allowed them to fix it. The rhetoric spouted by the likes of Ballmer does not gel with this kind of move, and even the recent high water mark of Ballmer committing MS to being more open had the look of a man who had a gun to his back, and it didn’t take long for him to start beating his drum about patents again after that. I’ve been skeptical the action on the ground would be free from gotchas or caveats, and the original OSP certainly reinforced this. No longer.

With this change, Microsoft has made a significant step in the right direction. Companies deploying & supporting the likes of Samba, OpenOffice & POI have operated under something of a cloud until now, glancing nervously over their shoulders in fear of suddenly becoming a target for the three hundred pound gorrilla beating its chest about patents and Linux, and customers felt the anxiety too I’m sure - leading to less credibility being afforded to those kinds of alternatives. If MS stay true to this agreement it really does open opportunities for better competition in the commercial sector, which can only be a good thing for customers. Keep this kind of practical change up Microsoft, and I might even start liking you again. Just get rid of that relic of 1980’s capitalism you have at your helm

I think this is a very interesting and balanced write-up of the life and times of William Henry Gates III. I still can’t believe we gave him an honoury knighthood though.

So, as we all know the whole MicroHoo! idea has been called off now, unless you believe the conspiracy theorists who believe this is all still part of Count Ballmer’s plan to devalue Yahoo! (as some of its shareholders go through a set of inevitable legal tantrums) and make it easier to pick up later. I’m not so sure about that myself - after all didn’t the rotund billionnaire say he wasn’t going to raise the original offer for Yahoo!, before doing exactly that? Doesn’t really sound like a bluff, unless you factor in that he knew they were going to reject that too, thus increasing the chances of annoying their shareholders. But then we start getting into the ‘he knew that they knew that he knew’ territory and it all gets dreadfully confusing. Whatever the case, the whole deal has always sounded like a recipe for total disaster to me. So much so, I was kinda hoping it would go ahead just so that I take some perverse pleasure in watching the train wreck later.

No-one I’ve spoken to ‘gets’ the Yahoo! bid at all, seemingly a constant across the entire spectrum of opinion about both companies. I can understand that Microsoft would love to get hold of Yahoo!’s ad customers, and to a lesser extent all the freeloading users required to eyeball said ads (and the services required to keep them sweet), but they can’t have seriously thought that it would be a smooth transfer. The philosophies of the companies couldn’t be much further apart, with Yahoo! very much invested in open source technology and service models, and spritually the culture of the company is very much of a younger, consumer-oriented, more agile and open thinking sort, very different from the business-focussed, shrink-wrapped and closely integrated, keep-it-in-the-company sort of vibe that Microsoft tends to exude. I’m sure Microsoft must have earmarked a bunch of money to use in encouraging key people to stay, but honestly in my experience the very best people aren’t swayed that much by that kind of offer. I think had the deal gone ahead, MicroHoo! would have haemorraged much of the best Yahoo! talent to other Valley companies like Google (or to new start-ups) in the first few weeks, whatever reassurances might be given.

And what about the technology? Yahoo! is again the antithesis of Microsoft here, running their core business on open source stacks. Quite whether the acquisition would have eventually led to that being replaced with equivalent Microsoft technology I don’t know, but a switch would seem like a pointless effort - regardless of your technology preference, the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ rule is universal. But at the same time an entire growth arm of the business running ‘competitors’ products would be somewhat jarring I would have thought, so perhaps their principles would have had them invest in that transition anyway - none of which sounds like a particularly efficient investment.

So actually, I think Microsoft has had a lucky escape here - I think they would have been hugely distracted (not to mention considerably poorer) trying to make a Yahoo! acquisition work. Sure it might have advanced them to some degree, but it surely would have been a messy, inefficient fight which would have given their main competitors - ok competitor - much amusement. The big question is whether they can achieve more on their own. The word is that Steve Ballmer is obsessed with beating Google (you would have thought he’d be content with all the billions he already has, but I guess there’s no pleasing some people), so it will be interesting to see what Plan B is. I hope they’ve screwed the chairs down in his office.