The Fight for The Future

Open Source was born at the right time and application developers are using the open source anthem to tell Microsoft and its likes “Run for Your Life”

Just like most open source applications, Google and Ubuntu (for humans) was born on the web and is forcing the decades old software giant to compete on its terms. Like open source and cloud computing.

Many people speculate that Microsoft will make-up for the mistakes of Vista with Windows 7, but I strongly believe that in the long run, its very own success with desktop operating system will be lost to the likes of Ubuntu and Google.

It’s really not fair that Microsoft has become a victim of its own success. No doubt, Microsoft will still continue to make a lot of money, but its last two quarters have seen its traditional strengths dragged on earnings while enterprises spend more money with Ubuntu, Google, Red Hat MySql and Fedora. Just to mention a few.

Just like most open source developers, Google’s lack of legacy allows it to innovate freely, rapidly and broadly.

The rate of innovation of open source with particular reference to Google (Google’s life cycle) is five days and that of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft is five years. It’s incremental. You can’t cancel your Microsoft Office licence in five days, but in five years, you won’t have your Microsoft Office.

Microsoft, for its part, is so concerned with backward compatibility “is this product/feature compatible with our ability to continue to monetize our 1980s-style desktop monopoly?” that it continues to struggle to embrace the Web. A blogger at CNET pointed out that Windows 7 should have been Microsoft’s launch pad to cloud computing, but it isn’t.

There is a lot of “should have been” for Microsoft and the likes when it comes to the Web and open source. Meanwhile, in the mean time, no one is slowing down for Microsoft, not the big enterprises so why should I, that why I made the decision to switch to Ubuntu some days back, which is free and for humans.

Microsoft is losing the mobile OS war, and not just to Apple. It’s losing to Symbian, Google Andriod, and Ubuntu. A recent study pegged the Andriod smart phone penetration in just the UK at 10%. Not to talk about other mobile OS.

With mobile, fast becoming client platform of choice, where does that leave Microsoft in the mobile war? where Google and its likes squeeze Microsoft from the top (cloud) and at the bottom (client).

In both areas, open source is the weapon of choice and its one that Microsoft will have to figure out quickly if it still wants to remain relevant in the Web. The web is too big for Microsoft to control and its overwhelmingly open source.

Open source is the back-end and the invisible part of the Web that users don’t see.

Most servers run Linux as their operating system; they run Apache as the basic Web server on top of which everything is built. The main language out of which everything is built on the Web – whether it’s Perl, Python or PHP are all open source. If this is true, it will be right to say that the Web depends completely on open source.

I believe that Microsoft’s war with open source is over, or should be over in the near future. OPEN SOURCE HAS WON. It’s the essential infrastructure now and Microsoft needs to accept and embrace that, not fight it.

This is the point, where the doctor tells you that your love one is never going to make, you feel so sad and the only you can say is “it shall be well, don’t fight it anymore”

“it shall be well Microsoft, it shall be well”.

“we all loved you, but open source loved you more”.

“adios.”