During the last few years, Microsoft has gone all-in competing against Linux, Google, and SaaS vendors. Much of the work and success has redefined the company in terms of how it interacts and plays with competitors as well as the community. It wasn't simply enough for the company to tout its strengths and showcase a competitor's weaknesses, Microsoft wanted to identify its own weaknesses. From that endeavour, some major technology shifts occurred, primarily a huge focus around interoperability.
Whether you are talking about virtualization, server infrastructure, productivity software, collaboration, or development, almost every major enterprise technology has had an infusion of open-source style thinking. For example, Microsoft virtualization technology not only supports a Microsoft stack, but can also manage a VMWare environment extremely well. Hosting Providers who want to offer services under both Windows and Linux do so with Microsoft Hyper-V because of its affordability and resilience as a mature solution. On the cross-platform development end, Silverlight has been a true game changer, invigorating the hearts and minds of the rank and file while also inspiring former outcasts, exiles, and zealots who vowed never to touch a piece of Microsoft technology again. This progress was executed first via the enterprise channels, but consumers and web technologists have also benefited from the effects of, to coin a great American Republican catch-phrase, "trickle-down" prosperity. Realizing that the latest technical platforms on the web truly balance the scale between huge enterprises and small businesses, Microsoft is expanding its goal around making Windows a great platform for open-source projects by actively investing in their development.
If you recall, 2009 was the year that "pigs flew," because it was the year that Microsoft made a top-down showing in interoperability with everything it did. Some of the biggest gestures included becoming platinum sponsor of Apache Foundation, contributing GPL code to the Linux kernel, and open-sourcing many strategic .NET frameworks under BSD. If you want a more comprehensive list, check out my presentation below. There are many core developer-focused technologies listed.
Hell Froze Over, Pigs Flew, Microsoft Went Open
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Coming back to the present, 2010 is a big year as well because Microsoft is investing in making sure the free ecosystem of open-source technology, both competitive and complimentary, works well regardless of a customer's choice in software infrastructure. Umbraco and Drupal, are two popular CMS systems that are free and have a very dedicated community of users. In the case of Umbraco, which happens to already leverage .NET, Microsoft wanted to make it better, easier and more capable than something like WordPress. Sure, SharePoint will always be the official CMS of choice for the hardliner salesman at Microsoft, but one shouldn't have to abandon the entire Microsoft ecosystem just to use free technology. What better way to improve the product than to invest resources with one of the key developers for Umbraco? See his video here.
On the flipside, Drupal is a technology that uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, and is based on PHP. The motivations to invest here are not as clear up front, but it only takes a little digging to realize that Drupal developers are actually a tech-agnostic bunch and just want to make Drupal a great CMS platform. So here Microsoft has sponsored a team of developers to provide feedback and improve integration with IIS and Silverlight. The idea being that the use of great technology shouldn't be an "either-or" decision.
Choice always wins. Customers shouldn't have to be forced into a set of technologies, and the accomplishments of 2009 and the work being driven in 2010 shows that modularity will be a key strategy for Microsoft to help make it easier for customers to use the best technology for the job even if it means helping products that compete. Competition and "Co-opetition," differ by only one character, but this single character has lead to an innumerable number of changes at Microsoft.
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