Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : MJM

Putting our own House in Order....

MJM — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:34:00 GMT

Jamie blogged about Open Source Day earlier this week. I’d like to provide a little more context about what the day was and why we did it.

About 6 months ago, our team was discussing the fact that, while many external people understand what Microsoft is trying to do in the open source space, many folks inside Microsoft still aren't fully aware. As a result, we continuously discover people across Microsoft who are interested in (or working on) ways for their product or program and open source to grow together but believe they have to 'go it alone.'

To help those folks, we decided to put together an informational event to explain to key segments of our internal community what the company is doing with open source and why. Little did we know that what was originally expected to be a 2-3 hour discussion in a conference room with a few people would turn into a full-day event with 12 presenters, a 400-person, full multi-media presentation hall and one heck of a catering bill.

When I first announced our intent to inform employees about Microsoft’s source code strategy, I received an amazing response. Although my team spends its days thinking about how Microsoft participate in the open source communities, we sometimes forget how many parts of the company touch on open source issues. From product groups to marketing groups to our legal division, it seems like everyone has questions or ideas about how Microsoft should engage with open source.

Ultimately, since this was our first internal event, we decided to go with the 30,000’ view and bring in a series of speakers to talk about what we’re doing with source code and why we’re doing it. We left a lot of details to later discussions. The point of the day was to get employees thinking and talking about open source in new and challenging ways.

To make sure the day wasn’t a Microsoft echo chamber, we invited Raven Zachary from the 451 Group to provide external context for our discussion. He got the day off to a stimulating start by providing an entertaining and informative overview of the business of OSS and how Microsoft fits in. While Raven pointed out some of the good things we’re doing, he focused particularly on what we’re not doing so well and how we can do better. He also provided the audience with some great insight into how Microsoft is viewed by many in the OSS community. He showed one slide in particular that really made me think:

This is a map from a site that is regularly updated to reflect how the “software wars” against Microsoft are progressing. I think the image is great, and not just because it’s entertaining. It reminds me that everything we do as a company is being watched and analyzed by smart and insightful -- even if sometimes a bit obsessive :) --- people. That means we have to do “real” things, and we have to be transparent about why we’re doing them. That doesn’t mean that everything we do has to please everyone; that will never happen. We just have to be sure there’s a reason for what we do and we that we share that reason openly and frankly.

After Raven set the stage, the audience heard from a number of folks including Sam Ramji, the Sr. Director of Platform Strategy, and Bryan Kirschner, the Director of Community Strategy who explained our open source strategy from a business and community perspective respectively.

Probably the most provocative of the morning’s keynote speakers was Tony Hey, the Corporate VP of External Research. Tony’s background is in academia, a place where Microsoft has had some challenges (as this slide from his presentation vividly illustrates):

Tony gave an inspirational talk about how Microsoft should be willing to work with open source in the academic arena. Tony is a straight shooter, and he emphasized that, when you strip away the ideology and propaganda, our goal is to provide the best experience for our customers. To do that requires flexibility in how we approach software development and licensing. As a company, we should expand our horizons and harness the best of all the various approaches to create the most efficient solutions to academics’ technological challenges.

The rest of the day involved talks by various groups who participate in code sharing at Microsoft, including the Shared Source Program and CodePlex (before anyone complains, neither of those groups were billed as purely “open source,” although there are certainly open source aspects to both.) We also discussed OSS legal issues and had a couple of panels involving folks here at Microsoft who work on open source projects or programs, including Rob Mensching, the developer of WiX, John Lam, the developer of IronRuby, Shawn Burke, the developer of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and Tom Hanrahan, the director of the Microsoft-Novell Interoperability Lab in Cambridge, Mass.

At the end of the day, we had a reception for the hardy souls who stuck around through the snow. I was very pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the audience throughout the day and at the reception. There were tough questions and great stories from across the company. We knew there was a lot of interest in the company regarding open source, but we were surprised by the depth and breadth of that interest. This bodes well for the company because that interest will drive more and more open source activity inside and outside the company as we move forward. Who knows, maybe we’ll get Steve Ballmer to talk at Open Source Day 2009.

Microsoft, Open Innovation and Open Source (Part 1)

MJM — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:45:00 GMT

In reading Jamie’s recent blog post on software and engineering excellence here at Microsoft, I got to thinking broadly about the impact of access on innovation. Obviously, the constant advances in software technology have not occurred in a vacuum. They are the result of people within and outside IT companies who have created, shared and borrowed from each other to create new and better products.

The expansion of the knowledge sources and markets through exploitation of internal and external options has been referred to as “open innovation,” and is described by Henry Chesbrough (who coined the term) in Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm as:

“Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology. Open Innovation processes combine internal and external ideas into architectures and systems. The business model utilizes both external and internal ideas to create value, while defining internal mechanisms to claim some portion of that value. Open Innovation assumes that internal ideas can also be taken to market through external channels outside the current business of the firm, to generate additional value.”

A couple of graphical representations I came across recently help make this clearer (from www.openinnovation.eu/openinnovatie.php). The first represents the traditional “closed innovation” R&D model:

In this diagram, the firm boundaries are represented by solid lines, indicating that the company’s ideas all come from within, and they are pushed out within the traditional market paths. Compare that approach to the “open innovation” model:

In this diagram, the firm boundaries are indicated with broken lines, illustrating the free flow of ideas into and out of the company throughout the research and development processes.

Thus, Open Innovation is at base the strategic modification and/or removal of traditional barriers to knowledge sharing and market access to maximize the values of ideas.

Such an approach is contrary to the traditional notion of siloed, jealously-guarded development. Traditionally, companies like AT&T, IBM, Apple and for that matter Microsoft have made billions relying solely on their own people and ideas. But in the interconnected world, a guarded approach to R&D is becoming less realistic and, more importantly, less productive. It is almost impossible to corral ideas when massive amounts of information can be transmitted easily and instantaneously almost anywhere in the world. And, even when it is possible, doing so deprives a company (and arguably society) of the immense power of collaboration.

Ah, there’s that word: “collaboration.” It’s the magic term of the new millennium, but what does it really mean when we get down to brass tacks (or better yet, dollars)? I came across a brilliant example of money-driven collaboration recently in the Innocentive website. This site matches “seekers” and “solvers” in an “Open Innovation Marketplace” and claims to have over 135,000 solvers in 175 countries over 40 different disciplines. The website promises cash awards of up to $1M for solutions to big, industry problems. This approach has been called “crowdsourcing” and “mob wisdom,” and it represents a fascinating, if extreme, example of the open innovation principle.

However, can a business survive solely on an external community for its new ideas? Companies such as Dell, Eli Lilly, Proctor & Gamble, Google, and Best Buy have reportedly turned to crowdsourcing for new ideas, but you don’t see them jettisoning their R&D departments. There’s still a lot of value to be gained from in-house research and development. The key is finding the balance and using multiple avenues of knowledge creation. As Joel West and Scott Gallagher point out “a central concern to open innovation is how to best use the internal R&D capabilities of the firm to maximum advantage…successful approaches will often combine a variety of approaches.”

In my next blog post, I want to look at the interplay between open source and innovation in software generally and discuss Microsoft’s approach in particular. That approach, like all attempts to harness open innovation, is open to critical analysis, but there are sound business reasons for it. I intend to make a discussion of those reasons an important focus of my blogging here on Port 25.

Participating Thoughtfully

MJM — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:49:00 GMT

When I introduce myself around here, I usually lead with the caveat: I am not technical. It’s true, I played around with BASIC as a kid, and, in high school,
I tore apart a series of Apples in the generally vain attempt to understand how they worked. I even went to university to study electrical engineering and
robotics. But I only made it two years in that because, when all was said and done, I simply wasn’t very good at the technical bits and bytes.

I grew up thinking I wanted to study artificial intelligence. Turns out, I was more interested in the “intelligence” than the “artificial.” Much to my parents’
chagrin, that realization led first to the study of philosophy and then to academia. Ultimately, I ended up in the law, where I spent the last 8 years.

About 10 months ago, I left my practice and joined Microsoft. Now, here I am on the Community Platform team at Microsoft, blogging on Port 25. If you
are asking yourself why, I don’t blame you. I’ve asked myself that question more than once since I’ve been on board.

Most see open source as a technical phenomenon, and indeed it is one of the more important movements in software development of the last decade or so. However, it’s also a legal, sociological and, in many ways, a philosophical phenomenon. These latter aspects make “open source” a fascinating subject for
someone with my background.

Bryan has blogged several times about the concept of “participation.” Participation – and the related ideas of access, inclusion and collaboration – are
vital concerns in a world of rapidly increasing information and expanding access. When you also consider Bill’s recent blog about networks and “six-degrees
of separation,” you can tell that participation and the community it engenders are constantly on our minds around here.

These concepts are fundamental aspects of open source and the focus of my job. As the open source research and policy lead, I examine how Microsoft can better understand and participate in the open source community and how, through its participation, Microsoft can create more opportunity for software
developers and users around the world.

Thus, I’m pleased to announce a couple of our activities in 2008 that I hope will advance knowledge and understanding of how IT-based communities come into being and best grow and function.

The first of these is a paper award we will be sponsoring with International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA). This award will go to papers that focus on empirical studies of collaboration and collective development of software projects, including the development of open-source software. Related collective products like documentation, support, and design and studies that highlight important group processes and practices associated with robust software will also be considered. More information about INSNA can be found at www.insna.org. The site is undergoing a migration and revision, and the details of the paper awards will be posted in January when the new site goes live. The second activity is Microsoft’s sponsorship of the Computer and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association’s (CITASA) pre-conference and graduate workshop on July 31, 2008 in Boston. This event combines a pre-conference on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and "Worlds of Works," building on the theme of the 103rd annual meeting of the ASA, and a workshop for 20 selected graduate students researching any aspect of the sociology of communications or information technologies.

The program will include a keynote address by the winner of the "Microsoft CITASA Port 25 Award," a series of presentations on ICTs and the sociology of
work, especially in distributed and virtual environments, and a series of select student presentations of work-in-progress (on diverse themes within the
sociological study of communications and IT) to both a general audience and to a mentor panel of well known and established researchers in the field. For
more information, visit http://citasa.ist.psu.edu/pre-conference. These activities are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Microsoft’s open source
involvement. From contributing code to developing concepts, Microsoft is actively engaged in open source, and is getting more involved daily. I am delighted
to spend my time thinking about new ways we can learn about and participate in the open source community. Working with this team and many other people across Microsoft to change (as Bryan puts it) the company’s open source “DNA” is a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll do next. I anticipate and welcome your feedback as we continue to move forward, together.