Microsoft Being Transparent
I was struck by yesterday's eWeek interview with S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft.
Back in the day (say, 8 years ago), MS was mostly applying a thin veneer of "Web friendly" or "Web savvy" to their products, their marketing, and their development of developer communities around their products.
Now, however, it seems that Soma -- and others at MS are really ingesting the valuable lessons of the open source world. Soma says: One of the things I have personally learned from the open-source community or movement is transparency. The reason I'm excited about transparency is if I'm a developer what I really want to know is the internals of the system, I want to know when decisions are getting made, I want to know why the decisions are getting made and... that Microsoft can provide a way for me to interact on a regular basis with the product teams that are building the technology... In some sense the thing open source has done very well is having a rich, vibrant community. That's what we've learned over the last three or four years, that having a rich, vibrant community of customers is absolutely critical and is even more crucial in the developer space.
Soma's right -- open source has built a community.
However, Soma is also wrong. Open source is not just about developers contributing to the product, it's also about customers contributing to the product. The majority of developers who contribute to open source ventures are using the product for day-to-day work. That's why they have a yen to fix it. Fundamentally, Microsoft still doesn't trust their customers enough to give customers the power to change things.
Back in the day (say, 8 years ago), MS was mostly applying a thin veneer of "Web friendly" or "Web savvy" to their products, their marketing, and their development of developer communities around their products.
Now, however, it seems that Soma -- and others at MS are really ingesting the valuable lessons of the open source world. Soma says: One of the things I have personally learned from the open-source community or movement is transparency. The reason I'm excited about transparency is if I'm a developer what I really want to know is the internals of the system, I want to know when decisions are getting made, I want to know why the decisions are getting made and... that Microsoft can provide a way for me to interact on a regular basis with the product teams that are building the technology... In some sense the thing open source has done very well is having a rich, vibrant community. That's what we've learned over the last three or four years, that having a rich, vibrant community of customers is absolutely critical and is even more crucial in the developer space.
Soma's right -- open source has built a community.
However, Soma is also wrong. Open source is not just about developers contributing to the product, it's also about customers contributing to the product. The majority of developers who contribute to open source ventures are using the product for day-to-day work. That's why they have a yen to fix it. Fundamentally, Microsoft still doesn't trust their customers enough to give customers the power to change things.
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