Could Open Source Fuel the Next Bubble
Greg sent me this article at the New York Times,"Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again" and Stacy says (via Matt ) Ballmer is hunting for Open Source Start-Ups.
"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said--a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.
This gets me to thinking...
With the Yahoo! acquistion of Zimbra for $350 million and the Citrix acquisition of Xensource for $500 million is there an impending feeding frenzy for open source companies? It wasn't that long ago that Red Hat bought JBoss and Oracle acquired Sleepycat. Maybe these are just the beginnings of a bigger trend.
So back to the boys from Redmond, so who does Microsoft buy and why?
Well I would think you need to discount the database market, they wouldn't want to compete with MS SQL.They probably would stay away from CRM because of Microsoft Dynamics.
Perhaps they should buy a company for the technology and something complimentary to their portfolio. Granted a company with a large community might be nice but could be quickly alienated because of anti-Microsoft sentiment that prevails in many open source communities. What might be even better is an open source software company that they can take from obscurity and fueled by the Microsoft channel and their hordes of cash. These are the areas that come to mind.
- Systems Management - They could grab a monitoring
company since they don't really have a hetergeneous management
solution. I won't even dive into this for reasons of my Zenoss connection. [Of course there's an idea.
]. They could go big and acquire publicly held SourceFire
for their security offerings. With the recent addition of ClamAV to
their portfolio maybe Microsoft could pre-install open source virus
software on Windows servers. I bet Symantec and McAfee would love that. - Advertising and Web Marketing - Well they just gobbled up Atlas Solutions maybe they should look at buying someone in open source who's early stage and can run on Micrsoft serverr, Loopfuse (Marketing and Sales Automation) or web ad server maker OpenAds .
- Other ideas--Here's some other creative ideas:
- They could stick it to Google on the search front and acquire Appscio
(formerly Avidence) for their video search technology unless they are
shedding their open source ambitions with their old name.
- Alfresco for document management makes sense, and it runs on Windows. I also doubt there is too much anti-windows sentiment in their user base.
- Maybe take CleverSafe's p2p storage technology and incorporate their technology with Sharepoint somehow.
- They could stick it to Google on the search front and acquire Appscio
Maybe they should just create an open source incubator and start
funding open source start-ups centered around promising open source
projects. Maybe They could seed them in Microsoft's Codeplex and bring them them up under the rainbow colored Microsoft Windows umbrella.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
For more Mark Hinkle, visit his EncoreOpus blog.
I'd rather be broke than sell out to Microsoft. I'd be iffy about selling any opensource project but the idea of selling it to Microsoft is just horrible. Try asking the original HotMail developers what happens when you're bought out by Microsoft. Some dingbat PHB forces you to change from a fast, free, flexible, and reliable platform like FreeBSD over to Windows, everything that makes your product great is slowly killed to make room for the retard ideas of upper management that still doesn't grok your revolution, etc. Yeah - I can't wait.
If Microsoft wants to make peace with the open source world they first need to grant 100% access to their patents for software under open source licenses. Until they do that it's obvious that they don't get it. Then maybe they can create a few open source projects themselves. Then they might be ready to be a member of the open source community and they may be able to effectively profit from that community. I'd suggest open sourcing Internet Explorer. They already have trouble keeping up with their competition and they already have a lot of open source and free competition. Web developers would really appreciate that move because IE could finally catch up with Safari, Opera, and Firefox.
Any one ever read "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen? It basically explains why Microsoft will have trouble making any real profit out of open-source technology unless they change the company culture. There is also another trend it explains that is applicable to Microsoft. Microsoft products are steadily climbing up the price scale into a seemingly more profitable market, meaning servers and embedded applications. The only problem is that Linux is already there. They are essentially stuck, unless they take up the entertainment sector in a big way. This is the most profitable choice with the way video games are going. But they just cut Bungie loose so, I think they are about to miss the boat there.
To sum it all up, I think no matter what they do from here, they are near doomed. =P