OStatic

Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie gave a talk this morning at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference, one of those gatherings for top-level executives. As part of the Q&A, he was asked about the perception that Google was a disruptive force that was hard for Microsoft to deal with. While admitting that Google was a tough competitor, Ozzie went on to focus on something he called "even more potentially disruptive": open source.

Listening to his comments, it seems that open source has had a sort of double-whammy impact on Microsoft's thinking. First, of course, there's the lack of profit motive to many open source projects. Ozzie mentioned that open source developers didn't have shareholders to answer to (which is an overstatement - certainly teams like those behind most of MySQL and SUSE Linux, for example, have to think about shareholders in the long run). It's easy to see how this threatens Microsoft: if some group gets a wild urge to build and give away a topnotch alternative to a cash cow product like Windows or Office or SQL Server, how do you stop them? This is where Microsoft's emphasis on building cutting-edge features comes in, as well as the bulk of their anti-open source FUD.

But there's also a second disruption that Ozzie mentioned in passing: When Microsoft goes into the enterprise, it finds that open source has beaten them there, or is coexisting with Microsoft products. This may be a tougher nut for Microsoft to crack; it's one thing to arm-wave about the inferiority of open source software to people who haven't bought it yet, but it's quite another to run it down to organizations that have already adopted it. This is where the vague threats about patent coverage come in, as well as some of the "embrace and extend" tactics that try to make it easy to migrate away from purely open source solutions.

The classic definition of "disruptive technology" is one that manages to replace the existing alternatives in a market. If Microsoft does continue to encounter a rising tide of open source software among its largest customers, it may discover just how disruptive open source can really be.

• Microsoft
• google
• ozzie