Summary: Microsoft is the biggest enterprise software company in the world and one of the most profitable. But it’s flagship product, Windows, is the walking undead, thanks to Microsoft’s two huge gaffs: missing out on mobile, and Windows 8, which turned Windows into something the typical consumer doesn’t recognize.
By building its own Surface PCs and smartphones (with the purchase of Nokia’s mobile phone unit), Microsoft has ditched the strategy that originally made Windows win the world. Instead of leaving the PC hardware to many partners, Microsoft wants it all.
To no one’s surprise, this isn’t going over well so far. Sales of Surface PCs are lukewarm and one of Microsoft’s biggest hardware partners, HP, is openly running to Google and calling Microsoft a competitor.
But Google didn’t cause Microsoft’s death spiral. Neither did Steve Jobs.
The credit goes to something called free open source software (FOSS) and an operating system called Linux, which came from a guy in his dorm room 22 years ago named Linus Torvalds.
If there’s a bug that needs fixing, or a feature that needs adding, users are free to do it themselves.
When software developers give their work away under an open source license, users will fix bugs and add new features the original programmer never even thought of. As the project grows in popularity, the developer makes money by offering support services. Red Hat has grown into a $1.3 billion company this way.
The Linux operating system (which in Linux-speak is called a “kernel”) is proof that open source is an extremely efficient way of working and it’s not the only example. There are lots of other open source projects like databases, storage software, networking software, Office software, and so on.
In fact, Android is a form of Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system). So is ChromeOS, based on the Linux distribution Gentoo.
Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin is likely one of a handful of people in the world who has had a front row seat to the largest collaborative development effort in the history of computing, Linux. He understands that speed of innovation and quality of software development is dictated by forward thinkers who are working in collaboration.
That is why he was recently invited to speak at TEDx about what the technology industry has learned from Linux, and specifically its creator Linus Torvalds, and how some of those lessons can be applied to a variety of efforts and projects across geographies and disciplines.
Linux has been pretty successful and the TEDx audience was eager to learn how it has achieved such success and how they could apply some of the Linux community’s best practices to their own work. In true Zemlin style, the lessons seemed a little surprising at first but as he elaborated, the audience soon understood how Linux has become the largest shared technology resource known to man. It runs the Internet, our smartphones, televisions, the world’s high performance computing systems and eight out of 10 of the world’s stock exchanges. It’s literally the foundation for our global economy, he explained.
He attributes the success of Linux during his talk to four primary principles:
Don’t Dream Big
Zemlin quotes poet David Frost in his first point about not dreaming big: “Don’t aim for success if that’s what you want. Do what you love and believe in and it will follow.” This is exactly what Linus Torvalds did when he put his Linux operating system on the Internet in 1991 and said he didn’t think it would be much, just something he was doing for fun.
Give It All Away
Zemlin also makes an important point about how companies make money from software that is given away. By giving Linux away, Linus Torvalds and the entire Linux community have created more value than anyone could have imagined. Linux today is estimated to be worth more than $10B. IBM and Red Hat continue to see increasing shareholder value, while companies using largely closed development models have seen little return to their shareholders.
Zemlin says that even Apple gets the value of Linux and open source software. Inside every iPhone and iPad, there is free software. He says,” Apple knows something that many people don’t. When you stand on the shoulders of giants you can innovate at higher levels.”
Don’t Have a Plan
He goes on to explain that the plan for Linux is there is no plan and shares with the TEDx audience how self-forming communities result in faster, better collaboration. Seven changes are made to Linux every hour, 24 hours a day, because people are self-motivated and care about what they’re working on.
Don’t Be Nice
His last point is perhaps the most entertaining and provocative. Zemlin talks here about the value of flame wars, defending ideas and ridiculing code. The result? Better software. He cites a UC Berkeley study that found groups that are encouraged to debate rigorously and defend their ideas, opposed to traditional brainstorming where every idea is a good idea, come up with better ideas.
I don’t want to spoil the ending so I’ll just say that he makes the argument that the future is one where you can enrich yourself while at the same time enriching others. Check out the 18-minute talk here and share. If this TEDx Talk inspires you, let the TED team know and help us spread the word about Linux.
“The Linux kernel changes eight times an hour. There are 10,000 lines of code added a day, 8,000 lines of code subtracted. Even Amazon and Google couldn’t keep up with that level of development on their own,” Zemlin says.
Ingenious people have modified Linux to work on huge supercomputers, and on tiny devices, like the $25 Raspberry Pi PC. (Pi, in turn powers all kinds of other amazing inventions). Today, Linux runs everything from automobiles to televisions, Zemlin says.
Plus, many of the developer tools used to write Linux are also open source. Torvalds invented Git, a tool for managing open source projects. That lead a few other guys, who had never even met Torvalds at the time, to use it for a company called GitHub. GitHub has since become the most popular place to store and share other open source projects.
Google, Twitter, Facebook and others have given away lots of open source developer tools, too.
This all adds up to a non-profit organization, the Linux Foundation, with a $25 million annual budget. The money, and engineering talent, comes from companies like HP, IBM, Oracle, Intel, Samsung, Google, Cisco and others, the Foundation says.
Microsoft spent a decade being an enemy of open source. Today Microsoft does offer lots of software via its own open source licenses, but not its biggest products like Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Server, SQL Server, etc.
Microsoft is still forced to keep up. Its execs have vowed to release new versions of all of its software every year, instead of its previous three-to-five year cycle.
But it’s on its own to build the software, fix the bugs, and so on. Meanwhile, a $25 million organization is producing 18,000 code changes a day and giving it all away for free.
Thanks to Linus Torvalds.