Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Interop, Bryan Kirschner

Time to Say Goodbye

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:37:00 GMT

The first time I went to a LinuxWorld conference as a Microsoft employee, a guy passing by me saw "Microsoft" on my name badge and stopped. "Microsoft? What are you guys doing here?" he said. "I loved Microsoft. You put my kids through college."

As it turns out, he owned a small IT business during the late ‘80s and early 90s, which thrived building applications during the headiest days of the "PC revolution."

The last time I went to an OSBC as a Microsoft employee, I MC'd the third annual Open Source ISV "Day 0" event hosted by Microsoft. I told that story in my opening remarks. At the reception at the end of the day, one of the attendees came up to me and said: "You know, I'm one of those guys who's been doing technology for 30 years. And today's event felt like Microsoft in the early 90s. It's the first time I've gotten that from Microsoft in a long time."

It seemed a very fitting way to bracket one of the most challenging but also rewarding periods of my career: one that had its roots and the fertile soil for its success in my friends and former bosses Bill Hilf and Sam Ramji. They created space for me, the latitude to go out and figure out a way forward for Microsoft and open source, by first listening to customers, developers, and sys admins face-to-face.

That opportunity culminated in my becoming the first person in the company (but not the last!) to hold the title "Director of Open Source Strategy" and shipping the first company-wide statement of policy and position on open source.

But, by this time, you've probably figured out something's changed. I've moved on become Vice President for Corporate Strategies at Greenberg, Quinlan Rosner Research.

There are a few things I have always gotten excited about: technology is one. Politics is another. Learning new things is a third. These add to a strong desire to spend all of my time playing MMORPGs. But since that isn't economically viable, they fortunately also add to up a consistent interest in understanding interesting, often controversial, convoluted, and conflict-ridden-situations and figuring new ways forward.

I did this in the public sector, working on community policing, where I sprinkled in some work on political positioning, messaging, and communications. And then I brought that background to Microsoft ten years ago.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner connects all the dots in a new and exciting way. The founder, Stan Greenberg, is widely known for being the pollster and strategist for Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela. GQRR has a big political consulting practice, and a smaller (but expanding) corporate consulting practice. Continuing and accelerating the growth of the latter is my new job.

I've been around Port 25 since its very beginning. Pre-beginning, actually. I owe a huge debt to everyone inside Microsoft but, even more importantly, outside Microsoft who helped make it what it is today.

My new boss, Jeremy Rosner, was the subject of a movie called "Our Brand is Crisis." Port25 will always be with me as a powerful and tangible part of a big shift from "Microsoft and open source" looking more like a "brand" that equals "crisis" to one that looks more like...well, like Port25. Which is what it should be.

So...thanks. I certainly still expect to be engaged on issues of openness and technology.You can now find me at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

Open Government Collaboratives

Bryan Kirschner — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:33:00 GMT

The city of Matsue, Japan is using Ruby to promote regional economic development. One of the unexpected highlights of the recent GOSCON, was a gentleman from Matsue coming up to me after I had given my talk about open source and Microsoft and saying "I am using IronRuby. I love it."

It was a nice moment because - even in the best of times - public sector IT typically has resource constraints that make it tough for them to think aspirationally about technology. And right now isn't the best of times.

But if you step out of the current challenges for a moment, it was a reminder that whether you're a developer at Microsoft or at the Census Bureau, you have the potential to contribute to something people would love. (Why do people at the north end of my zip code take 5 minutes longer to get work? On a percentage of the mean basis, that's huge. Does the disruption of the grid by the lake have that much of an impact? Yes, I am a long-time GIS nerd. Ironically, there is a nerd GIS - although, sadly, it is an acronym and not a density plot of nerds per square mile...).

On a more practical level, "open government collaboratives" was a theme of the conference. This is a consortium-based approach to development -f or example, multiple cities cooperating to develop a web toolkit for libraries. (Brian Prentice and Andrea Di Maio at Gartner call this "community source.") The good news is that both open source and Microsoft can play useful - and complementary - roles in this.

Open source has demonstrated a set of practices, and open source communities have developed a pool of technologies - Plone, for example, was a popular CMS that government collaboratives customized.

I wound up speaking to a couple folks about things like enabling single-sign on with Active Directory into their Plone-based systems. This is exactly what Sam Ramji describes (in graphic detail) as our open source strategy: as the application ecosystem (including open source applications) on Windows grows, products like Active Directory become more relevant. (In the case of Active Directory, and System Center, those applications don't need to be on Windows.)

I started my talk with two simple declarative statements: open source is neither a fad, nor a magic bullet. Microsoft products are neither a fad, nor a magic bullet (mildly interesting diff for a slow day: live google).

More importantly, over and over again, this was the right starting point for a face-to-face conversation with the IT managers attending GOSCON. For most, this is where they are as well - considering all the tools in the toolbox, trying to determine the "best tool for the job." That can be challenging, but it's a bilateral, constructive challenge we can work together on-to find a solution set that developers and users will love.

The Imperative of Participation

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:42:00 GMT

I blogged awhile back about “Microsoft and open source growing together”—more in the sense of concurrency rather than causality. Today I’m blogging about the latter.

I’ve found the graphic below to be one of the most powerful visual representations of a basic fact that is often forgotten. The surface area of the globe below represents the total number of the people working in the technology ecosystem and all the economic activity in that ecosystem. The little square in the Redmond, Washington area is shown—at scale—Microsoft’s relative size by number of employees and annual revenue. It’s 0.05% of the total ecosystem, according to a Harvard Business School study.

The point this drives home for me, in a very intuitive way, is that any smart technology company would be foolish not to think about participating in that larger ecosystem with business partners, developers, and user-innovators. There’s simply a vast amount of passion, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit outside the boundaries of any one firm.

I was reminded of this profound point when I watched Sam’s interview of Allison Randal (IMHO, one of those people in that broader ecosystem whose passion and intelligence anyone would be a fool to ignore). There was a phrase used in that interview describing her perspective on the open source community: “the principle that everyone deserves to participate.”

Today Microsoft and Novell announced something that couldn’t be a better example of companies thinking hard—and being willing to take some risks—to participate in that broader ecosystem, guided by the principle that everyone deserves to participate.

The size of that little block in Redmond may be small relative to the total ecosystem, but—no bones about it—Microsoft is a successful company, and as a result Microsoft invests a lot ($7B a year!) in R&D. Among the results of those investments are accessibility technologies: User Interface Automation (UIA) is which is an accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products.

What Microsoft and Novell announced today is about working together to bring UIA to a broader developer and user community, enabling creation of accessible products across both Windows and Linux platforms.

On the Microsoft side, Microsoft will make available its User Interface Automation (UIA) specification, which is an advanced accessibility framework that simplifies the development of assistive technology products for people with one or more disabilities, for implementation regardless of platform, in the open source and proprietary software communities.

On the Novell side, Novell will develop and deliver an adapter that allows the UIA framework to work well with existing Linux accessibility projects--Novell’s work will be open source and will make the UIA framework cross-platform while enabling UIA to interoperate with the Linux Accessibility Toolkit (ATK), which ships with SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise, and Ubuntu Linux.

On a strictly emotional basis, it feels pretty good to come to work on a day when the big news is about create a cross-platform solution that will provide people with disabilities greater access to computer technology.

But since I cited Harvard Business School to explain why participating in the broader community was a business imperative, let me take a little more of a hardcore business approach: Any technology company that wants to stay in business needs to think about reaching beyond the boundaries of their little “box” in the graphic above.

Any technology company that really wants to succeed, in ways nobody—whether their shareholders or their competitors—could have predicted needs to think about both reaching beyond the boundaries of their box and making that big globe even bigger. If you can figure out how to grow participation in that larger ecosystem—well, there’s that much more passion, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit out there to engage with.

Today, Microsoft and Novell just took a step toward making that big world even bigger by working together across the boundaries of each firm, and across the traditional lines between proprietary and open source software development.

It feels really good to come to work today because of this single event—it feels even better to me because I am very confident this is an example of Microsoft and open source growing together—causality, not concurrence. This is the shape of things to come--remember you read it here on Port25 first.