Steve Richards: OpenSource

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Superb article about the meaning of Open

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 22:53:40 GMT

Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what's important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards. he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance. He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.

Definately worth a read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary

Red Hat goes from strength to strength

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 22:05:51 GMT

I was talking with some senior guys from Red Hat last week about their potential move beyond platforms towards solutions. We were actually discussing collaboration solutions. There view at the time was that their focus was to take what was available in the Open Source community and productionise it. Its interesting therefore to see them release an application server. When you look at the potential though to address the collaboration market Red Hat would do well to consider packaging a solution for email, IM, document management etc. At the moment they ship the bits, but the bits don't make a solution. If you look at a previous post about Microsoft and their, "integrated innovation", marketting there is probably as much scope if not more to do the same thing in the Open Source world. Start thinking Solution guys, you seem to have Platforms and Component packaging fairly well sown up.

Linux and thin clients

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:52:55 GMT

eWeek reports that Wyse, (a long term user of Windows embedded technologies), is now moving into Linux in a bigway.

"Linux has really grown, and has become 20 percent of the worldwide thin-client marketplace,"

What actually suprised me was that the market share was so low, given that Linux seems to be a perfect fit for the embedded market, but clearly it takes time for things to catch on.

Interesting view on XML and the benefits of generic solutions

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:46:17 GMT

This article describes some of the characteristics of XML that make it so powerful The bottom line is that its generic nature means that generic solutions can be created tat can be applied to all manner of different problems. The example quoted is a tool that compares two XML files, produces an XML file showing the differences. The article then goes on to explain how this generic tool might be applied to different types of problem. Well worth a read if you are trying to get your mind around some of the things that will be possible in the future. Reminds me a bit of Unix pipes!

IBM and Linux, - but what about Sun?

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 12:31:23 GMT

Jonathan Schwartz, provides a very interesting perspective on the pickle that IBM have got themselves into over Linux. Whats even more interesting is that he does not discuss Sun's simillar predicament! Maybe thats because his series of blogs on this and related topics is building up the background for Sun's position which is likely to see a return to the promotion of Solaris as a viable alternative to Redhat which is gradually being positioned by Jonathan as a kid of "proprietary solution", certainly one that locks you into RedHat.

Update: I am not the only one who is puzzling over what Jonathan is up to with his blog. Look at this eWeek article that pulls lots of opinion together, it appears Jonathan is playing a pretty risky game.

Open Solutions or Open Source?

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 17:01:53 GMT

Although not strictly contradictory, it makes for a nice title. This article is about one of Microsoft’s reactions to Open Source and one way in which it is delivering on its “integrated innovation”, marketing strategy.

The basic concept is that Microsoft takes a collection of their products, and applies them to the solution of a particular business need. They publish for free standard architectures, processes, templates etc. You can populate these architectures with some products of your own choice. In a way whilst this is not Open Source it’s a sort of Open Solution.

The concept is quite interesting to me because one of the challenges with Open Source software, due in the main to the way it is created, is how to build a coherent solution from the many different components, without some over-arching architectural vision. Where does this vision get created in the current Open Source development model? It happens within IBM, Red-hat and Novel etc and it probably happens in a proprietary way. Even if all of the source for the components in the architecture are Open, the architecture itself is likely to evolve in directions specific to the motivations of its creator and be effectively proprietary.

So I am left thinking should the emphasis shift from Open Source to Open Standards and Standard Architectures. Maybe this in the long run is more important. If the software that implements the standard happens to be Open Source then that’s all well and good, but at the end of the day possibly of only transient importance. In their own way, (Microsoft always do things their own way), Microsoft is giving us an example of Standard Architectures, implemented increasingly with Open Standards. Not quite what I had in mind, but it’s what got me thinking in this direction.

Solaris and Linux

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 12:27:00 GMT

Johnathan Schwartz writes a nice article about Sun's dilema, now resolved, about how to compete against Linux. Linux is not a product, its a social movement that Sun applauds, so how can they compete? He goes on to explain that in reality Linux is delieverd as many incompatible distributions, and that its not viable to test against them all. Out of this confusion, in the server space especially, Redhat have appeared as the clear leader. Now says Johnathan, Sun has someone to compete with, and their relationship can be a normal business competition without the complexity of the social movement.

He talks a little about Open Source Solaris, gives a download link for Solaris and I provide a link to a Whitepaper that provides more details on Solaris.

Productivity before elegance

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 14:28:45 GMT

In this article, webservicespipeline.com discusses the rate of adoption of .NET compared to J2EE. Its conclusions are quite suprising. It seems that the rate of .NET adoption continues to grow at quite a rate, and puts usage on a par or slightly greater than J2EE. It puts .NET success mainly down to increaded developer productivity and ease of deployment and management.

This is signifiacnt for three main reasons:

In the hard nosed business of IT software development, even with all of Microsoft's woes, when it comes down to making business decisions, many IT companies still seem to make decisions based on rational criteria, and long term strategy and architectural elegance or portability don't win out in many cases.
There is likely to be a lot of new software developed for the Windows platform
Mono is going to be a pretty important Open Source project

How does Open Source Software come to be?

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 18:23:17 GMT

This may seem like a simple question to answer, i.e. is written, just like any other software! It also might seem a strange sort of question to ask, but you will hopefully get my point if you read on!

NOTE: No thorough analysis supports the observations I report here.

It seems to me that the vast majority of the important Open Source Software comes to be through the following mechanisms:

Cloning or reproducing in some way an existing design specification or similar. Examples of this route being Mono(.NET), Linux(Unix) and Wine(Win32). This technique is usually to force a product or interface into the open, by creating an alternative.
Donating, i.e. some third party gifts pre-existing Open Source to the community, examples of this being OpenOffice, Zope and Niku. This route is often taken by closed source product companies with an old product that is not generating much revenue. The closed source community uses this old product line to, improve their image, generate services revenue, stimulate demand for optional closed source products, kill off a competitor etc. In some cases the original developer continues to have some involvement in the development, in other cases not.
Sponsorship, i.e. some third party, usually a commercial company, for reasons of their own, sometimes benevolent sometimes not, sponsors the community to develop a product or improve it in some way. Perl and Python are examples of this. Most often those sponsored are development leads. This is often taken by companies wishing to safeguard investments that depend on the continued evolution of the Open Source product, or to stimulate demand for a relate product like training or books.
Academia, i.e. some academic project deliverable evolves or develops some Open Source software.
Community demand, the final and by far the rarest mechanism is that the community sees a need, appoints a leader and builds a community to solve the need. The best examples of this are extensions to the four categories above, for example a driver for Linux or a filter for OpenOffice. I believe the most important example however is Apache.
Individual demand, i.e. a person pursues an interest, or a personal need, programming languages are a good example of this for example boo and pylon. The passionate individual becomes the leader by default and may gather around then a small band of co-developers who share the interest.

I hesitate to put them in order of importance, because of the importance of the exceptions, however if we set aside Linux, then Donating seems to be the most important way for "market shaping" software to become Open Source. The order of importance is then probably:

Donating
Cloning
Sponsorship, (because it funds the community leaders)
Academia
Community demand
Individual demand

Of course these mechanisms are not the sole domain of Open Software, Free Software, (i.e. free to use), has also been developed extensively and uses all of the same mechanisms to come into being. An additional very important mechanism for Free Software being bundling, i.e. its free with this book, magazine, operating system, training course, paid for product etc.

Future posts will reveal why this analysis is important, in my view at least.

Tonsillectomy and Open Source

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:02:52 GMT

My youngest daughters, twins, and I have been in hospital for the last two days for their Tonsillectomy and I have taken the opportunity to re-read the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and to start reviewing my past experiences with Open Source with the model it describes. I have also started to review its progress against Eric Raymond’s predictions and some of the challenges it faces. As a result I now have an Open Source category in my blog and two daughters without Tonsils.

Looking to the future

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:00:20 GMT

My previous two posts gave two examples of projects that would have benefited from having been Open Sourced. They happened a long time ago, when I worked for a different community and both have disappeared so there’s no problem with discussing them. When these products were developed Open Source was just an emerging concept. I am not going to discuss the history of Open Source, that’s been well documented already, and I am not qualified. However I am going to start to build up a series of articles that describe some of concerns and the challenges I think the Open Source model faces in the future. I am going to assess some of the established beliefs as documented in Open Source bibles like the Cathedral and the Bazaar and I am going to do my bit to try and help.

Lost Opportunity 2

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:58:32 GMT

I thought I would pick two previous projects and look at their potential as Open Source projects. The second I picked is a bit whacky. It was written almost entirely in DCL and provided an automated help desk job logging, analysis and reporting tool and knowledge base. To write this in DCL is a testament to the flexibility and power of the VMS scripting environment and indexed files and the creativity of one of its developers, (not me). But the concept was mine and its ‘conceptual integrity’ was maintained for many years. What value could this have had in an Open Source context:

The application itself had little value, although it was trivial to deploy and could have proved very popular for other small support teams.
The tools developed to manage a complex system constructed from DCL would have been very valuable
The library of DCL routines would have been very useful to the community
The concepts used in the system which allowed 4GL like application development may have inspired other developers to rapid application prototyping of similar applications.

This system lived for well over a decade and died because the team that used it were disbanded, had that not happened it may have continued to spiral out of control through entropy like neglect which Open Source enthusiasm and stewardship would/might have prevented.

Lost Opportunity 1

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:47:03 GMT

In a previous post I described a simple networked or standalone, (depending on data definitions), document imaging processing project I led. This system would have been perfect as an Open Source project for the following reasons:

The need for such capability to be provided as infrastructure was universal. The main constraint at the time to this happening being the high cost and complexity of the current applications. So adoption would probably have been quite rapid
The target user community tended to be very network centric, as they were often charged with distributed access to large central collections of information.
My company had no interest in the software, its interest was in an efficient way to capture and distribute its image data as efficiently as possible
The system was very extensible, allowing additional storage drivers, scanner drivers, printer drivers, viewers and databases to be added by other developers. The automatic maintenance of these components in line with new hardware advances and the increased deployment reach would have been very valuable
There were many areas of potential improvement. Some of the concepts were not fully realised, and many functional/feature improvements such as OCR were missing

It’s also likely that the community would have seen the natural evolution of the product to a web application, and created that UI and made the necessary database access module changes, saving my company the need for that re-write. Finally vendors of specialist image viewers, scanners and printers/plotters may have sponsored development as it would have enabled them to provide a working system, rather than a component.

In addition to the raw savings in development cost for my company the potential benefits for the community were greatest. The provision of document imaging capability, a truly universal need on every device and in every business, has never happened at the infrastructure level, but rather in an ad-hoc way at department level in most cases. This system not because it was the best, but because it was very simple, made few assumptions about its data, and few assumptions about its environment could have been the start of making this happen.

Open Source – even then

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:44:15 GMT

As I gradually migrated towards infrastructure and away from line of business applications, the reality of having to deliver applications to Windows and manage them on Windows began to dawn on me. To a developer used to centralised computing, with remote access through X Windows or terminal clients this was a considerable shock. However my first real Windows development project showed one of my most valuable character traits, I don’t give up easily! Without going into the gory details, here are some of the attributes of that first application, a system for capturing, storing, accessing and viewing large image collections:

Very easy deployment
Self maintaining code, i.e. a minimal system start-up application compared what was installed with what should be installed according to a central manifest, and updated itself accordingly.
A very flexible storage model built on the concept of logical storage units, (a bit like VMS logical names on steroids), which handled the fact that images could be on removable CD’s, local disks, media libraries, networked disks etc and in different combinations.
Data driven. The whole system was configured through simple text files and meta data definitions that defined the actual data structures in the SQL database.
Globally unique naming of files, to avoid cache conflicts between image collections from different sources accessed at the same client

The result was an incredibly cheap system to purchase and deploy, that could run on a laptop or on 1000 networked desktops with the differences all defined in its data definitions. Data collections could be distributed on CD, with updates on floppy disk, or networked but transparently cached for fast WAN access.

My team, (a very small one), built this system making extensive use of freely available software libraries, (for Visual Basic), in a very short period of time, and by having a small team with a leader with a clear vision we kept the concept intact from design through to initial deployment. Although like all systems entropy resulted in some degradation of that concept over time, resolved only when a friend of mine reinvented the system as a web application with similar clarity of vision.

Open Source – the real beginning

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:40:42 GMT

In this article I use Open Source in its broadest sense, (i.e. not consistent with the specific licensing defined by opensource.org), but meaning my experience in using other peoples source or developing source for others to use. In particular I wanted to give examples of where the concept of Open Source had it been so visible then, would have suited some of my projects.

My computing true home has, and always will, be VMS. As a VMS systems integrator I learned rapidly to admire the power, elegance and consistency of the system, its ‘conceptual integrity’ if you will. It’s this history of VMS that made it so difficult to admire Unix, which by contrast has always seemed lacking in that same ‘conceptual integrity’, to stretch a point, always seeming to have been assembled rather than architected.

It’s also that history of VMS that first attracted me to Windows NT, (the development of VMS was led by a team from Digital who worked extensively on VMS). Having been repelled by DOS and Windows, I was excited by the prospect of NT but ended up being left gaping at the lost opportunity, (still not realised today). I was truly shocked to read the early history of NT and discover the neglect of that sacred VMS like architectural vision for the platform as a whole.

This neglect seems to have been caused by two key issues

the focus that Dave Cutler and his team had on the kernel at the expense of everything else
the need to achieve compatibility with the DOS/Windows/OS2 legacy.

Had Bill Gates recruited a different, or at least more balanced, part of the Digital VMS team the world might be a very different place. Of course, pre-Linux, I realise that the Unix community saw a similar lost opportunity seeing the progressive dominance of the inferior NT and MAC/OS, (now corrected), whilst the superior Unix was increasingly marginalised.

It’s through Digital that I first experienced the web and deployed by first Intranet and obtained my first CD full of Open Source, (actually GNU), software tools and utilities, (for VMS).

Open Source – the beginning

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:35:59 GMT

This is the first real post in the Open Source category of my blog, but one of many in the blog as a whole, and one of many to come on Open Source. If you have read my blog from the beginning you will know that much of my recent experience is with Enterprise Infrastructures, and that has to a large extent involved software from IBM/LOTUS and Microsoft. Integration with Unix systems being through well defined and mature interfaces like NFS, X-Windows and DNS. This means that I have a lot of familiarity with Microsoft and I am open about the fact that there are things to admire about Microsoft, (and many things to not admire of course), however I have a long held low tolerance for Zealotry which I have talked about previously, but want to expand on here.

When I say I dislike Zealotry, I am not talking about passion, I am talking about taking a stance for or against something that can not be defended by rational argument. This causes me a problem, because as an enterprise architect, I spend my life having to defend the decisions I take with rational argument, and for me, ‘I hate Microsoft’ or ‘I hate Unix’, just does not pass the test. Second as an architect I have to recognise real world constraints such as legacy applications, investment prioritisation, application compatibility, cultural aversion to change or risk etc in my solutions. These two factors have shaped most of my thinking around the Linux/Windows and previously Unix/Windows debate.

However that is changing, and this blog will chart that change. However before I dive into that I want to provide two of the main reasons why Open Source has become important to me personally and also professionally.

Reason 1: Credibility

I have noticed an increasing number of well respected Microsoft employees or expert system integrators either migrating to Linux or becoming expert in both Windows and Linux. These individuals seem to have maintained a rational view of the world and are able to develop solutions recognising the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms. It’s also interesting to see this happening in other areas, a good example being the .NET/Mono community who talk of the elegance of the .NET framework, whilst at the same time criticising Microsoft for lacking the vision to provide cross platform support. I want to ensure that I am more than credible as an architect, open to, and conversant with the benefits of Open and Closed source alternatives and their respective merits.

Reason 2: Concern

I have become increasingly concerned about the prospect of the worlds infrastructure being run by the proprietary technology of a single supplier. I increasingly feel that the world’s IT infrastructure needs to be owned by the world. That’s not to say that I am confident that the mechanisms are in place for this to happen naturally with Open Source as it is delivered today, but more of that in later articles.

Professionally I find myself increasingly being asked to provide advice on Open Source alternatives and to develop solutions based on them.

New category - Open Source

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:21:13 GMT

I have just created a new category on Open Source in this blog. Some old posts have been re-categorised as relevant to this topic, the reason for the relevance may not always be immediately obvious. However I have a plan for articles I want to write on this topic, and some of these old background posts fit into that plan.

Microsoft and integration

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:32:33 GMT

I have thought for a long time that Microsoft don't make much use of their own software to build pre-integrated solutions for their customers, (unlike Oracle for example). They seem to have caught onto the idea at last, (not from listening to me though :-)). Anyway a few months ago they started to talk about solution accelerators, which are solutions built from sets of MS products with associated processes, procedures and best practices as well as custom systems integration. These solve particular business problems, like for example, the process of hiring new employees. There is also evidence that Microsoft is doing the same at the infrastructure level where the range of tools available to them is even richer, SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint etc. This is a good example:

Microsoft also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.
"We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application," Hassall said. "And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server infrastructure using SMS and Active Directory and BizTalk in providing an infrastructure for installation and provisioning services."

The company also plans to make available to enterprise partners a "zero touch provisioning" accelerator that will enable end users to self-service tasks such as requesting the installation of an application or resetting a network password.

"We built in a rules-based engine based on BizTalk that can automate requests, get approved by a manager, and install a new application," Hassall said. "And the opportunity is not just for desktop deployment but add-ons for server infrastructure using SMS and Active Directory and BizTalk in providing an infrastructure for installation and provisioning services."

Microsoft's latest marketting phrase - Integrated innovation is starting to mean something. If you want to see more on this topic then enter "integrated innovation", into the search box on the left, include the quotes!

Office news

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 18:46:40 GMT

A new version of open office is available. The main improvements are:

Enhancements to the open-source productivity suite include support for PDF and XHTML exports and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to the OpenOffice Web site. The new release, for example, will support forms conversion within Word documents and import text document layouts with more fidelity. OpenOffice 1.1 also boasts enhanced support for mobile device formats such as Palm's AportisDoc, Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.

IBM has ideas of its own, taking a thinner approach with its WorkPlace products

A wild card in the Office wars is IBM, which plans to offer server-based word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functionality to buyers of its WebSphere portal. At the very least, that could allow large customers to negotiate better Microsoft Office pricing/licensing, observers said. (See IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office.)

The MS Office team are majoring on quality for their next release, does this imply major changes, requiring major testing, or just good practice?

Software development, especially for a product as feature-rich as Office, is a repetitive process comprising what can seem to be endless feedback loops and rework.
"We're trying to reduce the iteration of that cycle because it's extremely costly," said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Group. "We want to use our development resources more effectively, yielding higher-quality code and not iterating what customers never see," he said.
The Office 12 team will rely on new tools, including Buddy Web, a system developers can use to privately share releases, according to the memo, from Eric Fox, Office development manager at Microsoft. Buddy Web had previously been used by the Outlook team.
In addition, the Office group will have access to Big Button, a system that gives developers easy access to the appropriate set of tests for their code.

Office 12, will not reply on Longhorn, not really a suprise, but its in print.

Microsoft knows it would be folly to leave the hundreds of millions of Windows XP and 2000 users out in the cold and force an upgrade to the shiny, new and radically different next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, which is now expected to come out in 2007 or later. Office 12 initially was slated to ship with Longhorn, but the next-generation Windows platform slipped and Office didn't, according to one insider. "The Office team is disciplined. They nail down their feature set, set a schedule and usually hit it," the insider said.

Read all this in the context of my previous posts on Choosing an office suite

The five top objections to open-source

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:07:47 GMT

Computer World has an article on this topic, most of which has already been debated many times with simillar answers to the ones that CW gives. However I repeat the list here, because item 5 on the list is actually new to me:

Support availability
Functional limitations of the software
Software license terms
Rapid software release cycles
Package road maps or future plans

Items 1 to 4 are answered pretty well, and I don't think are a major concern now for most companies and the service offerings are developing at a rapid rate. However here is the answer to item 5:

Package road maps or future plans are important to most companies. Major vendors tend to heavily promote their road maps, even to the extent of publicizing future capabilities years in advance. Of course, there is no promise that any advertised feature will ever see the light of your computer display. Not all vendors publish such road maps, and some share them only with strategic accounts under nondisclosure agreements.
Some open-source groups publish road maps, and some do not. At times, the stated goal is to mimic the functionality of a commercial package, though when any particular feature will appear is anyone's guess. The best advice is to make decisions based on what you can see and touch. If a feature doesn't exist, assume it never will, even if it shows up on a road map or vendor presentation.
With all these potential drawbacks and pitfalls, why would anyone consider using an open-source package versus buying a proprietary product? Ultimately, it's not about cost, so forget all those total cost of ownership arguments. It's about value and free-market choices. With any software acquisition, evaluate needs, explore options and select the best fit. Think of open-source as buying software from a small supplier. There may be additional risks, but the rewards can make it worthwhile.

I am not sure I agree with the conclusion that you should "Think of open-source as buying software from a small supplier", in my eyes for many of the major Open Source development projects you are actually buying into a roadmap dictated by an asset thats owned by and will increasingly run the world. Imagine all of the different agendas that will need to be accomodated when Open Source gets that popular, and the challenges that will exist to stop it branching in a way that damages compatibility. Lots more on this topic to come I think, but thats the first thought that popped into my head at 1:00AM when I should really be in bed, but am not able to sleep because of the blasted Steroids I have to take, that give you insomnia!!

Open Document Formats - XML to you and me

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 21:49:58 GMT

This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it. here are some of the more important links.

The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised here the full report can be found here. One of the nice things about this report is that its been reviewed by Microsoft and Sun, and their comments on it, (at least those they made public), are also published. Tim Bray, a man with some credibility in this area, (now working for Sun), describes his meeting with the EC team here. John Udell writes up his views on the EC report here. Dare Obasanjo responds to Tim Bray here.

Then the thread starts to drift a bit, but Tim Bray also talks about his views on how the OpenOffice team have used XML, he is impressed! And a snippet on how Microsoft have used XML in Office 2003, he is less than impressed! Tim also talks about the use of custom schema’s and concludes they are not a good idea, (Microsoft implement them in Office 2003, OpenOffice don’t). Jean, (a MS employee), gives his point of view, Jean like Tim is also a member of the team that created XML.

It's when I see something like this that Microsoft really disappoints me!

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 18:31:18 GMT

I have just been sent details of this InfoPath web application by Microsoft. I should have been pleased, but I was very disappointed, not by InfoView which seems to be a great way of publishing an InfoPath form so that it can be completed using a web form, but because Microsoft did not ship it!

Microsoft would have got such a different reception and eliminated a lot of trust issues if InfoPath had been positioned as a web form designer, offline editor and aggregation tool, with a complementary web forms interface for those not able to take advantage of the native client. I can not believe that developed in parallel with the thick client developing the web client would have been that big a deal either.

Anyway Microsoft chose a different route and instead of being seen as producing a great innovative standards based product that demonstrated the best of rich and reach, they chose a route that exposed them to constant criticism over attempting to lock people into Office and Thick Client technologies!

Come on Microsoft examine everything you are planning from the perspective of those who are uneasy about your track record, I think it will be your best long term form of marketing!

Next steps

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 13:33:08 GMT

I had some very good news today. I am to be working for most of my time for probably 6 months or more on alternative desktop solutions, looking at what the viable alternatives are to the Microsoft Desktop solution. This is an end to end review, ie not just looking at the Operating System, but at:

The operating system
The layered personal productivity tools
Integration with peripherals and PDA's
The service and systems management tools
The security tools
The integration issues
Application compatability and portfolio migration issues
The data and personality migration issues
The TCO issues
The user change/culture change issues
Changes to my companies service model and associated technologies
Some of the issues that result from running a mixed environment, or a parallel environment, for example VMware hosted
The architectural changes, eg thick or thin client, application delivery approaches
Some of the strategic differences including those that arise from the different motivations of Microsoft and the alternatives
The decision making process that a client needs to go through before choosing to go the alternative route

I won't be posting much more detail than this in my blog, but you can expect some of the key questions that I am asking myself to be posted along the way as I try and pick my way through such a lot of different factors. Its quite interesting to be starting work on this just a day after my posting on Zealots!

If you look at my blog on posts related to this topic, these are the most important:

Zealots

Rich Versus Reach - my perspective

Personal Information Disaster!

Which Office Suite?

Microsoft: Linux isn't cheaper

More integration of Microsoft Products?

Who will Longhorn appeal to?

In pursuit of personal and team productivity

Zealots

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:29:04 GMT

I get pretty frustrated around Zealots and there’s lots of them lurking around the IT blogs. I recently read a refreshing article by Jeff Dillon from Sun expressing similar views and it’s worth a read just to convince yourself that it’s possible to be passionate about Linux and Open-source in general and still leave room to admire something that Microsoft does. A while back a couple of people mentioned to me that I was perceived to be something of a Microsoft Zealot, well I found that quite amusing, you see my own perception is that I am familiar with Microsoft and Realistic about Microsoft’s role in the industry and like any reasonable person I admire some of Microsoft’s products, people and culture. Probably also like most reasonable people I dislike some of Microsoft’s products, and culture, and if I knew enough of them would probably dislike some of their people as well.

I hardly think this classifies me as a Zealot, but some people do mistake familiarity and realism for zealotry when it comes to Microsoft. Well I got to thinking why that is and came to the following conclusions:

Microsoft has had such a bad press recently that its not really in anyone’s interest to be seen as a Zealot even if you are one
Most reasonable people having read this bad press would find it difficult to be a zealot, at a push I guess one might admire the way Microsoft can recover from such legal embarrassment and technical and procedural neglect of issues like security.
Most people don’t really understand where Microsoft are going now, as Microsoft is talking only about long term vision and technical infrastructure. The products that will be built on this technical infrastructure that are going to deliver this vision are to a large extent still a mystery. So unless you are a real techy there’s not much to be a zealot about
Microsoft employees however are another matter, and continue to support and evangelise their company despite the above, which proves they must be doing something right on the culture front and maybe the product and technology front as well.

That said it’s likely that the absence of many real zealots outside of MS, means that realists like me are sort of the next tier down. Compare and contrast that however with Open Source Zealots though to see the real difference. Here we are talking Zealotry taken to the levels of the religious fanatic, and that means taken to the level where its impossible to trust anything they say or do because its not driven my a motive that most people can understand, i.e. not profit, customer satisfaction, personal satisfaction etc.

Of course I have nothing against open source software, I am not as familiar with it and realistically its not going to wipe Microsoft off the face of the earth during the next few years, but I have used and admired it for nearly two decades and watched it mature and become a real force in business and a force for good.

So I just wish the Zealots would lay off, that way we might see the reality more clearly and be able to trust what we read more often, this applies equally to the MS and Open Source guys. Let’s hear it for the realists!

Rich Versus Reach - my perspective

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:04:44 GMT

The Rich versus Reach debate is raging in the blogsphere at the moment. The debate has been very healthy with less of the usual emotional clutter that clogs up most debates that touch on the future of Microsoft. I am an enterprise guy, with a complex home network as well, which gives me an interesting perspective so I thought it would good to pull some of the threads together.

The debate mainly started with a post by Joel on How Microsoft Lost the API War it’s a good article at the start but then begins to lose its focus and starts to make some bold assertions which are hard to substantiate. These are partially rebutted by Olivier Travers in his post Microsoft Lost the API War? Not So Fast and more thoroughly by Robert in his post Seven Reasons Why the API War is Not Lost After All, which comes over a bit evangelistic but is still a good contribution to the debate. Robert introduces a new perspective for me on Avalon where he describes how it may be possible to download XAML directly from the web as an alternative UI experience to HTML but still accessing all of the same server side web services. Piva wraps up most of the discussion with a good summary. Finally there are a few less emotive discussions on the topic of Thick versus Thin which you might like to look at:

So what do I think about it all:

First let’s remember where the debate started which is that Microsoft has missed the boat again, and that the world will be a different place application wise by the time Microsoft finally ships Longhorn. The result Microsoft will have lost its platform advantage and all apps will be delivered to some platform neutral client. My comments:

Organisations, and individuals for that matter do not constantly upgrade their applications, nor do application vendors change platform rapidly. Whilst I have seen a huge number of web applications appear, many of these are new classes of applications that were only practical or economic to deliver via the web, were information delivery applications, or were reach interfaces that complemented the primary rich UI. In recent desktop refresh programmes I have been involved with Win32 applications have dominated and very few of these have had web equivalents that allowed us to ease the migration challenge.
In building Longhorn Microsoft appear to expect this to continue to hold true, hence they:
1. Are providing support for legacy applications
2. Providing UI services today, Winforms, that will still be there in Longhorn and in active use for 5 or so years
3. Expecting it to take 5-10 years before WinFX is considered the mainstream platform
4. I hope providing first class support for web applications and the ability for Longhorn to act as a web services client
5. I hope learning the lessons of the past, see later
I have debated here, my view of the Longhorn value proposition. It’s a lot more than just a platform for the delivery of applications. Longhorn will provide a rich set of UI services, communications services, data integration services etc that will enhance applications in ways that will be difficult to achieve with web apps alone.
There are a whole class of applications, (look at my PC as an example), that need a rich client. This does not of course mean a Windows client but it does mean that some form of rich platform will be around on the desktop for a long time. If this is Longhorn, and for many millions of desktops I guess it will be, then there is a good chance that applications will build on top of these services if there is a strong value proposition there. My feeling is that there will be a value proposition but that it will be a very long time coming for many applications. A lot depends on how much effort Microsoft make to ensure that Longhorn is appealing just with the applications that they supply or hardware vendors bundle with new PCs.
There is a lot of third party activity around thick clients, in the OS client space, (Linux and Windows), and in the application space with Java application platforms.
Personal computing is likely to see a resurgence, with personal information management, device integration, information aggregation from many different sources, news/change/subscription integration from many different sources. Some of this works well server side but some of it is just so much easier at the client side. I have talked a bit about what I want to see here
My hope is that Microsoft and others will make VERY sure that the problems we all face with thick clients and rich applications are largely resolved. With massive improvements in device deployment, device backup and personality restoration, operating system and application maintenance and application delivery needed as a minimum.
Information Bridge Framework gives some hints of the type of UI binding mechanisms we might see with Longhorn and how these can be driven by context that is maintained dynamically on the client based on what you do. I talked a little about IBF here.

Finally let me state my position:

I would like to see less emotion in the debate
Provided Microsoft make Longhorn a first class web client I have no problems with them
There will continue to be a variety of approaches to the delivery of applications, the market will decide based on features and TCO which approach suits which applications
It may be that Microsoft is on to something with their Integrated Innovation concept that will bring real compelling value, it may be something that only a company that sells an OS, Office Suite, Development tools, and application servers etc can see and make happen, good luck to them – Linux and IBM will keep them on their toes.
It maybe that Microsoft invented Integrated Innovation to protect their Client OS and Office suite revenues, in which case they are likely to be caught out in a big way fairly soon. I am debating this point in this blog entry
There are a lot of VERY smart people at Microsoft now, (a lot of them did not start at Microsoft), and they have a lot of money, enthusiasm and vision. Don’t under estimate them.
Microsoft are being extremely BOLD at the moment, they are facing a huge revenue hole over the next couple of years. They are undertaking a huge re-architecting of their platform and the applications that run on it. That boldness maybe born of arrogance, but I suspect not completely!

here is a recent blog entry that gives a fairly thhorough review of the original post by Joel.

Which Office Suite?

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 16:22:43 GMT

Which Office Suite? Is shaping up to be a fascinating decision making process. I am not ready to expose all of my thinking on this topic but it goes something like this:

Some people think its easy, MS Office alternatives are cheaper and most people don’t use the bells and whistles in Office so people will migrate provided the alternatives meet peoples core needs.
I think its more complex than this and as a minimum the costs of migration, lost productivity, and compatibility and rework need to be factored in
Intertia is a big one in Microsofts favour, for a business that has SW Assurance or an EA, the decision is deferred probably for at least 2-3 years after their EA expires and probably longer if they do a lot of data interchange. That probably means 4-5 years from now!
But this is the trivial stuff. Sure direct and indirect cost comparison is important but I want to consider:
1. How do people really use Office and is it really true that people only use a small amount of the functionality, and if they do, do they all use a different small amount?
2. I also want to consider vision, MS has a vision for Office, What is that Vision?
3. How open is that vision, probably not very! Is the value proposition worth the lock-in? Is the ‘integrated innovation’ that Microsoft are fond of worth the lock-in
4. What’s the vision of the competition, for some of them is it to catch up with Office 97. For others it’s a complete reworking of the concept. So it’s important not to just ask the question can it do what office does!
5. Remember the vision is the important stuff, if the decision is 4-5 years away!

Maybe that all sounds a bit dry, so why do I think it’s so interesting:

Consider how many users of Office there are
Consider how much of Microsoft’s profits come from Office and how desperate MS are to keep that profit coming in, desperate people innovate!
Consider how important Office is to drive MS Operating system sales and how important OS sales are to MS profits, desperate times two!
Consider how desperate the competition is to break the MS Office Suite monopoly
Look at the last few versions of Office, basically a stagnant product, innovating sure, but within a straight jacket imposed by the fact that all of the core Office stuff is effectively done, and improvements are marginal.
All the real interesting stuff requires further client side, client server, peer to peer and device type to device type integration
Hence we see the push in the Office System areas, Mobility, WinFS.

So its integrated integration where the action is from Microsoft's perspective and they are pouring billions into it, how are the competition addressing integrated innovation, or do they have an alternative perspective. How do the differing approaches affect real enterprises and real users, (see this blog for the difference). Thats the question I want to answer!

As a twist the answer may not just depend on the type of person you are, but on the type of device you use. So maybe portable device users and especially tablet device users will have a more compelling reason to stick with MS because for these people the flexible input technologies, online/offiline experience, home/work integration, device integration etc are more important.

Some of the important links are listed below:

Advantages of the OpenOffice.org XML File Format Used by the StarOffice Office Suite

Migrating to StarOffice Software from Microsoft Office

Draft of OO Product Concept Document

Accepted OO Projects