latoga labs

Quite a day. I wake up to see announcements about Oracle completing their BEA acquisition, Sun buys MySQL, and an announcement about new capabilities from MuleSource. Following my concept of “stuff hapening in threes is the universes way of telling me something”, I felt like these items were worth commenting on.

I know a number of people who are at BEA who are bit relieved that the entire acquisition process is over. There was quite the distraction hanging over the place with acquisition offer looming out there. And now you will see the exodus of people surge. Not many people that I know over there are excited about working for Oracle. But, from the Oracle perspective, this is a great buy. They removed a competitor in the app server market, get to cherry pick the Weblogic platform to integrate it into their own, and they finally get technology to make their Fusion product work. Hopefully there is no mis-understanding of the reality of this acquisition from the BEA user community…your BEA products will be going way…

Sun’s purchase of MySQL will be something interesting to watch. Sun isn’t know for their ability to acquire and not ruin technology. My understanding is that the Sun software business unit had a great year that they are wrapping up. But, Sun as a company still isn’t known for their ability to create value for customers with business solutions. I know some people there who have been able to do that in their small area’s of influence, but senior management still seems to be stuck in the hardware mentality that is part of the Sun DNA.

The bigger concern, is what does this acquisition do to all the SaaS and Web2.0 business that run on MySQL? While I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to Sun in the past few years, I have noticed them trying to surge ahead in the these two areas. It’s almost like a rebirth of their luminary “We are the Dot in dot com” marketing campaign of the internet bubble era. I have had some recent first hand experience with their Solaris Zones virtualization technology and find it highly lacking (not to mention a pain to use in a number of ways) from other solutions. Thus, I don’t hold a lot of hope out for them in the arena of virtualization. Hard to see much vision here…

MuleSources announcement of their 1.5 version with it’s governance feature and BAM like capabilities is interesting. While I haven’t had any direct experience with their offering, I find it interesting that they are not sitting on their hands and dealing with just integration but trying to add value to the larger enterprise. They show that they are not content to deal with just one small brick in the enterprise foundation. By taking on these two areas, they are now setting themselves up to be an annoyance to other larger players, most likely in the hope of widening their audience of possible suitors. (Too bad I didn’t’ get to know them better when they worked down the hall from me…)

Lately, in my discussions with IT executives as well as small and medium sized technology company executives the topics of Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS) customer services has been coming up. It seems that some Open Source ans SaaS providers have lost sight of the importance of the Customer. I have heard of SaaS providers that provide a level of self-support in the, now standard, form of Community Forums but fail to actively participate in the community themselves. I have also heard stories of Open Source users contacting the Open Source provider for support, even willing to pay for onsite consulting, but being ignored unless they purchase a multi-year support contract first.

It appears that the Technology business models may have changed, but many business are still operating the same. Regardless of their size or type, the executives behind these technology companies need to relearn a basic premise of business: you only exist for the customer; without the customer the business doesn’t make money and you don’t get paid. I might be a bit more sensitive to this than most due to my entrepreneurial spirit and constant contact with customers as part of a sales team. But some of the stories that I heard start to border on the level of astonishment in regards to how these companies have ignored their customers.

Maybe these software executives should take a lesson from Whole Foods.

Now before you think I’ve flipped, listen to this story of customer support that I experienced tonight. My wife was shopping at whole foods and when she got home realized that the checkout clerk had not given her the packages of meat that she purchased. When I ran back to the story to pick up the package at the Customer Service desk, the clerk who helped me was sincerely apologetic and also gave me a bag of chocolate chip cookies for my troubles.

When you look at this at the surface, you realize that this is the type of response one would expect from a business focused on keeping a loyal customer. All jokes about “Whole Paycheck” aside, I’m sure the clerk wasn’t even thinking about how much money we spend at Whole Foods regularly or about the $60 we spent there that day. She wasn’t thinking about the fact that the free bag of cookies (which costs $5.50) was almost 10% of the value of the groceries we bought that day. What she was thinking about was just keeping a customer happy and making amends when the business as a whole made a mistake.

Now translate that same thinking to the much more business savy technology industry. When an executive in an Open Source firm doesn’t want to send a consultant out to a user of that company’s Open Source software for a paid engagement (typical rates run between $2000 and $3500 per day) because the user doesn’t have a support contract (which typically runs between $20,000 and $40,000) who is the executive focusing on? Obviously not the best interests of their company.

Here is a chance to show a prospect the level of support you can provide…while getting paid for it…and earn the right to sell the customer a support contract. It’s earning 10% now in order to earn 100% later…who wouldn’t do that? It’s possible that there were absolutely no one available who could provide this consulting. Possible…but customer focused companies always seem to find someone who can wear multiple hats or be re-prioritized to earn a new customer. So, if the executive wasn’t focusing on what’s best for their company or what’s best for the customer…who or what were they focusing on?

Maybe some of the software executives behind some Open Source and SaaS companies should step out of their offices and into the real world once in a while. They could start out simple, lets say Business 101, by actually going out and visiting a customer and learning what’s it like in their customer’s environments. And if they really want to challenge themselves by taking Business 201, they could try working for a while at Whole Foods…

One of the great things about Open Source software development is, well, it’s open-ness. Sort through your list of Open Source packages that you are running in your organization. You can go in and look at the source code for each one of them, right? But what’s behind that source code? Or Who?

I recently found a very interesting open source directory called Ohloh. Ohloh (oh, what a name!) takes a very interesting ‘bot’ approach to open source. They employ a legion of software bots to crawl through the major open source repositories and collect information about open source projects that you may never have known.

For example, did you know that the Firefox project has over 3 million lines of code? More importantly, how fast has the code base been growing? (or is it shrinking?). All you have to do is check out Firefox’s Code Statistics on Ohloh. You can see a breakdown of how many files within the Firefox code base are licensed under which licensing scheme. A trended history of code lines. And a breakdown of what percentage of Firefox is written in what programming language. When deciding on an which smaller scale open source projects to use, you can use this information to make a better decision. Do you have programmers with experience in the languages used within a project?

You can also look at an open source project’s list of contributors and how long they have been with the project as well as how often they submit code. The system even gives a heuristic on each contributors experiences level with various languages based on how many submissions have been found in each language and over a given period. There is even a social network aspect to the site where programmers can rate their peers (which needs to be taken in context of any social network site…). About the only thing that is missing is the one click ability to see if there are other projects that a contributor is also involved with (you can do this by doing a search for a contributor on the main page of the site, but this is so obvious I’m surprised the site’s developers didn’t include that on each developer’s project page).

Of course, what would a website with social features be if you couldn’t have an account and provide your own feedback on projects. Ohloh has that, as well as the ability for members to define the stack of open source software that they use. Which gives viewers the ability to see how many people are using a projects.

Ohloh provides a new twist on evaluating opens source software projects. However, there were a number of projects that I use which were not on the site, some of those missing projects surprised me as Ohloh has been around since 2004. Guess no one is perfect…

Dictionary.com defines protectionism as such:

pro·tec·tion·ism /prəˈtɛkʃəˌnɪzəm/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciati[pruh-tek-shuh-niz-uhm] –noun

1.	Economics. the theory, practice, or system of fostering or developing domestic industries by protecting them from foreign competition through duties or quotas imposed on importations. …

This is the phrase that came to my mind a few days ago when I read the article about Microsoft’s Linux Support Subscriptions. Microsoft and Novel have teamed up and are brandishing the Microsoft patents at the technology community in an effort to stem the incoming tide of the open source community and fear of possible outgoing tide of revenue. Novel has struck a deal with Microsoft to have Microsoft bless the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (essentially saying that SLES has no unlicensed Microsoft technology in it…any Microsoft-ish technology that is there is now licensed). Microsoft is also hinting (not so subtly) that they might sue anyone who may have unlicensed Microsoft IP (or something that might look like Microsoft IP) in their open source projects. This then causes a ripple effect to commercial providers who may include open source components in their products (like Apple’s OS X) and the business who use these open source and commercial products. (sniff, sniff…do I smell SCO in the air?)

As a business person, I’m a strong proponent of IP protection and patent law. But eventually in a complicated soup like the technology industry, where stuff has to work together and interoperate, there needs to be some consideration of the best interest of the customer. Throw the open source ingredient into the pot and you get technology vendors who don’t believe or understand the open source movement looking for ways to protect their interests (i.e., revenue streams).

This is nothing new in the wider economic sense. All you have to do is do a Google news search for protectionism. You get examples ranging from the US government’s protectionism of the US Ports to the EU’s protectionism of sportswear imported into the union. The underlying goal of each of these examples is to protect one group form changes that are occurring in the larger world. There are lots of social and economic reasons that can be given for why the protectionism is needed, but the real reason is anchored in the fact that it’s hard for people to change. And in today’s change accelerating world, it’s only getting more and more difficult.

The technology field has been going through it’s own core changes for the past five to six years. The over spending of the bubble years led to the cost cutting and maturity of the use of IT within business. Large IT “deals” started to decline; programmers who were lured into the cycle of self-destructive levels of work and productivity for the false hopes of quick wealth started to turn their energies to the altruistic endeavor of open source development; businesses started to see real value and security in the open source projects.

A technology company is no different than a person…change is hard. Many companies fail because they either don’t change when they need to or early enough, or they don’t change fast enough. Then look at the biggest, they can delay the change through the use of their legal armies. Figure out a way to use the legal system against those that are causing the change. Boost your own declining revenue streams by instilling fear in your customers (all customers love vendors for doing that…ever hear of a license audit?). The move by Microsoft and Novell is nothing more than technology protectionism.

So Microsoft is scared. Windows Vista hasn’t been going as smoothly as they need it to. All of the cool features it was supposed to have have almost all disappeared due to technical difficulties of implementing them in the hodgepodge of legacy code. Apple’s computer and OS popularity has grown. Deja vu with the Firefox browser’s popularity continuing to grow. Another 800 pound gorilla by the name of Google has been invading it’s part of the jungle for a while now. How is the company going to keep or grown it’s 28% profit margin in order to keep another 800 pound gorilla (the street) happy? Release the IP lawyers.

An so business start to protect their own self interests and pay into the protectionism scheme. Of course these business need to save face themselves, so they change the name of the scheme 180 degrees from protectionism to interoperability. Wouldn’t you do the same if you had a well funded ($34B) army of lawyers marching toward you?

I just don’t buy this spin that this deal is about making Linux and Windows more interoperable. If that was the case, there are open standards that Linux has supported from it’s inception that Microsoft could start to fully support (interoperability is about more than just two companies products). This is all about Microsoft protectionism. I think the pressure that Microsoft is feeling is greater than what the general press is talking about (personal opinion). Rather than trying to inovate their way out problems they face with the changing technology marketplace, they are taking the protectionism route. Beat up on the marketplace by threatening to sue unless they buy a Linux License from Microsoft.

I’m calling shenanigans on this use of the De Tocqueville model.