Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: Slow Integration for MicroHoo
by Sam Dean - Mar. 11, 2008Comments (5)- Related Blog Posts
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You probably saw the comments from Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie this week, regarding his vision of a slow integration of technology platforms if Microsoft does acquire Yahoo. Ozzie told the Financial Times that seeking to "quickly smash things together" would be "reckless." However, most of the analysis of these comments is centering on how Microsoft might approach integrating Yahoo's online advertising with its own platforms. This misses some huge points, not the least of which is that Yahoo runs almost entirely on open source software, and Microsoft will have to embrace that if it picks up Yahoo.
Yahoo! is so firmly entrenched in open source software—from the server farms that its own site runs on, to its Zimbra division delivering open source apps, to the APIs that it offers to application developers—that Microsoft, as corporate parent, would have no choice but to shed much of its long-standing antipathy toward open source.
Yahoo!’s strengths have always been building online communities and audience generation, and its history of welcoming the open source community goes back to the birth of the company. Yahoo!’s entire site runs on FreeBSD—a free operating system descended from AT&T Unix. By expanding its server farms based on free software, the company set an early example for many other web companies. Historically, Microsoft has acquired applications running on open source (such as Hotmail, which also ran on FreeBSD) only to rewire them for Windows, but the time and expense of doing that with Yahoo!’s vast infrastructure would be prohibitive.
Before there ever was a dot-com bubble, Yahoo!’s current CEO Jerry Yang, one of its founders, proclaimed that users would create most of the content on the Internet. At the time of its founding, the theory in fashion was that “web site operators”—autocratic publishers—would create most of the content. Yang was right with that bet, as evidenced by much of the community-driven Web 2.0 action that we’re seeing now. As part of its open kimono policy, Yahoo! has collected countless valuable APIs that open its applications up to developers everywhere, in addition to entire divisions designed to woo outside developers to build applications.
Consider Yahoo!’s leadership position in the world of widgets (customizable, mini desktop applications that typically provide instant access to favorite content). Its leadership there began with the company’s 2005 acquisition of Konfabulator, which had a vast library of widgets and a dedicated community of outside developers building them. Yahoo! grew that community of application developers by keeping widgets both Windows- and Mac-friendly, and making it easy for anyone to freely offer widgets to others. That’s a radically different development model than Microsoft’s typical two-fisted, patent-hungry in-house developers tend to take, and a model that Microsoft would have little choice but to grow.
Microsoft has virtually no current foothold in the Web 2.0 world and the user-driven content creation that is so central to it, but in Yahoo! it would acquire teams of developers highly skilled in building and offering open APIs, as well as many existing, valuable open APIs. Yahoo! has developers and APIs deeply focused on PHP, Java, JavaScript, AJAX, ColdFusion, Ruby, Python and much more, in addition to many cross-platform applications.
The company is also very open about sharing user interface tools, as you can see at the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). And, Yahoo! is firmly pushing its OpenID plan, which would allow Yahoo! users to sign in online once and have access to countless applications. To shut down all of this openness, Microsoft would have to turn its back on one of the most valuable things it would get from Yahoo!—its proven ability to stitch developers everywhere and users everywhere together into powerful communities.
No, a marriage between Yahoo!’s friendliness to the open source world and Microsoft’s historical disdain for it would inevitably force the Redmond colossus to open its kimono more than it ever has before. Given Microsoft’s continuing nearly unilateral domination in everything from operating systems to browsers, that would be good for us all.
Lastly, for more from Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, see Om's interview with him.
Do you think Microsoft will have to embrace open source in new ways if it acquires Yahoo?
