Yes, I was at Microsoft today talking about Debian, Linux, and open source. No, there’s not a secret deal in the works between Microsoft and either Debian or the Linux Foundation. Well, except for the secret plan to fight inflation.
One word: Device drivers. (Ok, that’s two.)
One of the biggest problems for any developer building an operating system for the x86 is device support—how do you get your cool new OS to run reliably across the seemingly endless collection of hardware that is “the x86″? No matter how cool it is, it won’t seem very cool if it can’t talk to the hardware.
One time honored technique (at least in the academic world, and at least since I joined that world in the mid-1990s) is to use Linux’s huge collection of device drivers. Typically, that means creating a shim so your kernel can talk to the Linux device driver layer and, of course, making sure the licenses are compatible.
Not sure I understand the rationale behind GPLv3, since there are rumblings that v2 and v3 won’t be compatible, and since it doesn’t look like Linux is going to adopt v3 anytime soon. But Solaris adopting GPLv2 makes a whole lot of sense from my point of view just for the device drivers and the resulting boost to overall usability.
David Berlind: “With barely five days to go before long-anticipated January 30 launch of Vista is history, a familiar problem and the linchpin to adoption of any major operating system upgrade (Windows Vista qualifies) is crashing the party: backwards compatibility. Intuit, developer of one of the world’s most popular accounting applications used in small, medium and large businesses (Quickbooks), has notified its customers by email that Windows Vista is incompatible with some of the features of Quickbooks 2006.”
Mary Jo Foley: “Is it Intuit’s fault that its older products don’t work on Vista? Or Microsoft’s fault for changing the operating system in a way that it breaks them?”
George Ou: “As it turns out, it isn’t QuickBooks 2006 itself that has the problem with Vista but all the Intuit and third party add-on software that communicates with QuickBooks 2006 that’s the problem. More to the point, it’s the intercommunication between all those applications and the fact that they’re using forbidden techniques that have been banned since 2001 with Windows XP certification requirements that’s the issue. Intuit admitted to me that they declined to seek Windows XP certification for all these years and they’re just now making the necessary modifications for QuickBooks 2007. The reason this is relevant is because most software that is certified for Windows XP will automatically be compatible with Windows Vista.”
David Berlind: “So, while Microsoft’s response doesn’t point the finger directly at Intuit as the culprit in this situation, it makes it clear that its certification programs — programs that Intuit has apparently eschewed since 2001 — are the centerpiece of its efforts to guarantee backwards compatibility.”
Interesting discussion. Whose fault is it? It doesn’t really matter, as the end result is the same—Microsoft potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to Vista because QuickBooks will break), and Intuit potentially loses customers (those who won’t upgrade to QuickBooks 2007 but rather will move to an on demand solution like NetSuite—customers tend to dislike forced upgrades).
David Berlind’s observation is interesting though, namely that Microsoft has been using its certification programs to limit the scope of the backward compatibility problem to a well defined subset around which it can presumably do thorough compatibility testing. Note that Red Hat too only guarantees backward compatibility for a subset of its platform, and that the LSB doesn’t cover the entire Linux platform either, just the subset that’s import for application portability.
What are the lessons here, from my point of view? First of all, and not surprisingly, backward compatibility matters, and it matters (or should matter) to both sides. Second, to achieve that backward compatibility, both sides have to work at it, and because a typical platform has so many moving parts, limiting the scope is key to understanding the “contract” between OS and application. Finally, some formal way of stating “I am following the contract”, such as a certification program, can make compatibility a lot easier to articulate to mutual customers.
Related: On the importance of backward compatibility, More on the importance of backward compatibility
More Knowledge@Wharton: “Following the model that made Microsoft’s Windows so successful, Microsoft licensed PlaysForSure to multiple hardware vendors of digital music players. ‘We thought that was a brilliant strategy — [develop] an open ecosystem, get a lot of people [to support it].’ What happened? As Ballmer puts it, ‘In this particular case, the whole was not bigger than the sum of the parts.’”
As I said the other day, an ecosystem is never the sum of its parts—it’s either a whole lot more or a whole lot less. Microsoft was decidedly on the wrong side of the equation this time. Yes, Microsoft did what it had to do to compete effectively. Question is, will this make it harder for Microsoft to build the next ecosystem? And did the tactics Microsoft used to benefit from the last one play a role in the outcome this time?
(Via Mary Jo Foley.)
Knowledge@Wharton: “Today [Steve] Ballmer sees two major competitors for Microsoft — the open source software movement and advertising-supported software. According to Ballmer, the threat comes not from specific companies, but from the business models represented by these two trends. ‘Right now, the emblem of the first one is Linux and the emblem of the second one is Google. But it’s not the companies, it’s the phenomena’ that present the greatest challenge to Microsoft.”
Microsoft is very good at competing against companies, but how do you compete against “phenomena”? That isn’t as clear. (Jonathan Schwartz wrote about this in 2004.) And at least, from Microsoft’s perspective, the second phenomena is emblemized by a company. Linux isn’t even a company. The usual tactics won’t work.
There were a lot of good comments on my post about the importance of backward compatibility the other day (both here and in the blogosphere), and a lot more of them were positive than I was expecting, which I find encouraging.
A fair number of people called me out for using such a bad example—come on, changing the OS to fix a buggy application? Fair enough. Perhaps I diminished the point I was trying to make by referencing that extreme example, but it’s a worthwhile example for one reason: At Microsoft, the user experience comes first, notbefore developer sensibilities.
Fortunately, as others (rightly) point out, it’s hard to imagine a situation where such extremes would be necessary in the Linux world—for one thing, we don’t have the sheer number of legacy binary applications to deal with, nor do we have the same volume or average user profile as Windows. But the point stands. User experience should always win.
If you want another example, one from a company who any developer would agree is an outstanding engineering organization, here’s one: “Sun has maintained binary compatibility between operating system releases for nearly a decade, enabling existing Solaris applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10. This means that Solaris applications developed ten years ago will run on Solaris 10 unchanged, taking full advantage of new and advanced Solaris features.”
Me: “The hard part of building a standard is getting the right people at the table — those who are in a position to make that standard actionable. You can sit around all day and agree that there should be a standard, you can even agree what the standard will look like, but if you don’t have buy-in and participation from the people who can actually implement it and get the standard to be widely used, then you’re wasting your time.”
Robert Scoble: “Wait a second. You mean there’s a billion phones with Java on them and Cingular’s network hasn’t gone down yet? Damn, how did that happen?”
Steve Rubel: “Google is surely aware of the dependency it has on Wikipedia.”
