Now’s the Time: Open-Source Power Platform

Power Platform makes it possible for people with moderate levels of technical expertise to build full-stack solutions with built-in connectivity, security, and application lifecycle management, ready for the enterprise.

Ah, but what’s happening in the enterprise these days?

Specifically, what’s happening in enterprises that are:

?(a) willing to pay reasonable but not insignificant monthly per-seat license fees

?(b) for low-code tools

?(c) from a US-based company?

I have concerns.

The ideal Power Platform customer is a large government organization dedicated to helping their constituents. (See where I’m going with this?)

The ideal Power Platform customer empowers non-technical staff to create solutions that improve the quality of life for the communities they serve with selfless dedication.

The ideal Power Platform customer is being defunded, decommissioned, and demobilized. Not to mention demonized, demoralized, and demolished.

I’m spitballing here, but with over 62,000+ US government layoffs this year so far, how many M365 (with seeded Power Platform) licenses is that? Probably the same number.

How many Power Platform projects won’t get started because there’s no appetite, no budget, no personnel?

How many other government agencies awaiting their turn in the barrel are cutting back to essential operations, foregoing the expansive and inclusive nature of low-code development in favor of extreme contraction and cost-cutting? And what about their suppliers, and so on down the line across the broader economy?

And beyond our own borders, what do you suppose is going to happen to the appetite and willingness of governments and large enterprises outside the US to further tie themselves to critical technology infrastructure from a US-based provider? I don’t expect everyone to rip-and-replace lower on the stack (OS, cloud infrastructure) but a strategic top-of-stack investment that uses a centralized codebase must now represent a harder sell from a national sovereignty and information security perspective.

Sure, it’s not all doom-and-gloom in the Power Platform world. I imagine that Dynamics 365 is doing fine with SMBs on the merits of the product relative to competitors. And the overall cost-cutting trend may accrue to the benefit of Azure from increased cloud adoption.

But all this disruption will take the wind out of the sails (and sales) for Power Platform.

Give It Away. Now.

(You know the song.)

A thought experiment.

What would happen if Microsoft were to fully open-source Power Platform?

All of it.

From the source code, you’d be able to set up your own control plane to build out infrastructure across your own clusters on any cloud; your own management plane to orchestrate environments; and your own runtime plane for environments deployed on symmetric footprints deployed to two different “islands” with separate networking, stateless compute, and stateful storage.

In other words, you’d be able to build your very own Personal Power Platform. Review the source code. Fork the codebase. Do your thing.

What would happen next?

My hunch:

• Off-brand versions would create pricing pressure on Microsoft (and this is the short-term hit; the rest is good news)
• Dedicated Power Platform enterprise customers would continue with the status quo, with Microsoft running and supporting Power Platform infrastructure
• Given source-code review, global enterprises would continue to trust the platform’s codebase, regardless of historical or current alignment with the US government
• Organizations would make greater use of Microsoft and partner ecosystems for complementary services
• Enterprise budgets freed up for AI and other higher-value service layers
• Significant increase in innovation for plug-ins, UI, IDEs, and AI tooling
• Native integration into mobile device ecosystems
• The .msapp file format (for Canvas apps) becomes as ubiquitous as the .xlsx and .docx file formats
• Global adoption of Power Platform

Yes, it would be an expensive and daring bet. But I think it would turn out to be a profitable one.

I wrote this last year about the tremendous market opportunity for low-code solutions:

There's opportunity wherever someone wanted to build an application but there wasn’t money in the budget, or the IT department had other priorities, or there never was an IT department, or they found an off-the-shelf solution that handled 80 percent of their needs; or someone built a website 10 years ago that hasn’t been updated since.

That hasn’t changed. Now, on top of that, it looks like we need new systems at the community level to provide food, clothing, and shelter; to educate children; to fund disease prevention and cure; and to maintain scientific and historical records with integrity, among other things. ?

If we can no longer expect services to be provided by a central government, well then, let’s decentralize it.

And to do that, we’re going to need software.

Power Platform to the People!

No delay.

Talking billions

• Annual funding for USAID, 2019-2024: Between $20 billion to $25 billion
• Power Platform’s estimated revenue contribution to Microsoft: $7 billion to $10 billion
• Annual disbursements from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: $5 billion to $6 billion

Source: I asked Copilot.

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