First of all, what spurred this post is the news story from the UT home page:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-8509737.html?tag=mn_hdBefore I go any further, I'd just like to say that I'm typing this as I go, so don't expect a high quality white paper below, I'm just trying to start some discussion.
Microsoft is deciding that security and privacy are the number one concerns for the company, even over adding features to their products. Originally I thought that this is a bad call by MS, but perhaps its apart of something even greater.
This may come as a surprise, but I've always felt that Open Source will rule the world. I'm not a big fan of the current state of open source, nor would I ever prusue making money at it, but when it comes down to things, there will always be people without jobs creating open source technologies, wether in their parent's basement or in the university who are not trying to make a buck. Once those technologies meet up with and pass what proprietary technologies have to offer, costly sofware won't have a leg to stand on.
So I've always been wondering when this will happen (not from a technical standpoint, and I don't feel like responding to religious based replies like "Linux rulez, it always has, luser...") but I think that the moment is approaching. I actually orginally thought it would be many more years (50-100) but when a company like Microsoft decides to stop working on feature sets in order to bring its security and privacy to match open source's, I see no logical use for a company. This may sound strange, but I feel that you don't need $5 billion in research and development to come up with a solution to a problem thats laid out in front of you.
I'm not suggesting that MSFT is going to go away over night, or that they will no longer bring value to a computer user's "experience" as they call it, simply that they have taken proprietary software about as far as it can go when the threat of open source exists. They have some great products out right now, Windows XP and Visual Studio.NET in particular, and the Microsoft platform is definitly better than it was a couple of years ago, but after that they secure the platform... then what?
Here's what I would be thinking if I were in charge of Microsoft, aiming to exist in 20 more years. The first move was to get products out, get people using them, and start making money of it. They did that. After that, secure the platform. There's two reasons I think they should do this. The obvious is... duh, so the platform is reliable and people can safely invest in a Microsoft solution. However, the main motivation I'm sensing behind this move is (ok, this may sound like I'm nutty and just pulling stuff out of the blue) that they can successfully open up the source to Windows and still have a secure platform. My bet is if you spent 20 minutes looking through Windows' source (and you knew what you were looking for) you could proablay find enough security holes to take over any computer running Microsoft in the world. So, before Microsoft can join the rest of the world and provide open source products, they have some work to do. And I think that is what will eventually happen, perhaps within the next ten years.
Now the company can be left to do what they do best, innovate the consumers computer expierence, make applications easier to use, and for folks like us, easier to write. That is something that takes alot more resources to do than secure a platform. They will no longer worry about competeing with open source and universities, and no longer dealing with most of the legal problems they've been running into.
This is where my really strange theory comes into place. I think that Bill Gates wants his baby Microsoft to go down like this. Think about, betting the company on .NET, which is an intiative to get people to develop products that run anywhere on any platform? Then they release all the common langauge infastructure and runtime to the ECMA? This is amazingly un characteristic of them. However, I think they note that as far as Operating Systems and infastructures go, proprietary systems are on the way out.
Perhaps this means Microsoft intends to focus on the applications and sevices they're doing right now (like Office, Hotmail, MSN, Visual Studio, .NET services, ect.) but I'm thinking they will emphasise on the development tools in combination with devices like freestyle and mira. It is those areas where only organiziations with $5 billion in the bank will be able to exceed the open source's efforts. Where they used to be leveraging the operating system they put on everyone's PC, in the future they will be leveraging the archicture (.NET) they will hopefully (to them) have everyone's life running on, from the tablet's they use as briefcases to the MP3 players in your microwaves.
Anyways, those are just some ramblings of someone who needs to take a shower and get to work... but what do you think?
