Microsoft, Welcome To The Open World

As Microsoft enters its forties, the company is going through a major transformation. Call it the impact of leadership change, evolving market dynamics, or even mid-life crisis as the skeptics would describe it, Microsoft is certainly not the same company. At the recently concluded Build conference, the change was more evident. I could see an honest, humble, open Microsoft that is genuinely interested in listening to the customers, partners, developers and the community.

Microsoft, welcome to the open world!

I spent a good part of my professional life at Microsoft. When I started in 1999 as a sales engineer, the company was basking in the glory of Windows 95. The account managers exceeded their quotas quarter-on-quarter effortlessly. The market pull was high for Microsoft software. This dream run continued for a decade with Redmond churning out a successful server OS, development platform and tools, enterprise server software, and gaming console. During that period, Microsoft fought and won many battles. As a developer evangelist, I was directly involved in the heated debates of open source vs. proprietary software. The growing market share, high customer traction, vibrant partner ecosystem, and an active developer community made Microsoft confident and also arrogant. The company placed itself on a pedestal distancing it from the mainstream industry. For every successful software product, Microsoft had an alternative with an ambition of making it a category winner. For a long time, it was Microsoft vs. the rest of the world.

Microsoft’s wake-up call came in 2010 when it decided to enter the cloud services market. With over 50% of workloads running on non-Windows platforms, Azure had to support a wide range of languages, frameworks, runtimes, and tools. Like it did in the past, the company reluctantly created plug-ins and extensions for running Java, PHP and Python on Azure which did not go well with the community. When it entered the IaaS business in 2012, there was no other option but to support Linux running on Azure, which was the pivotal moment in the history of Microsoft. The company buried the hatchet with the open source advocates and reached out to prominent OSS companies such as Canonical, Chef, SUSE, and others. Microsoft also partnered with Oracle – its arch rival – to certify Java, WebLogic and Oracle database on Azure. It was remarkably clear for Microsoft that if it didn’t make that move, it would never be able to beat Amazon Web Services – it’s biggest competitor.

Read the entire article at Forbes

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter,  Facebook and LinkedIn.