Driving Real Change at Microsoft - Get Rid of Win32

Microsoft announced yesterday that it was releasing API and Client/Server interoperability details. Coming on the heals of the Microhoo! deal and Bill Gates publicly saying Microsoft is after the Yahoo engineers it must seem like Microsoft is going all open and friendly. But that misses a big point. Changing culture, particularly one ingrained and strong as Microsoft's, is not going to be as easy as publishing specs and adding a load of Yahoo engineers.

It is possible to change the culture for the better and the Yahoo engineers can play a big role, but they can't do it on their own.

The catalyst for the change is dropping the Win32 kernal and going with a Linux/BSD kernal. The Yahoo engineers then become evanglists and mentors for the adoption of the open-source kernal. The combination of the two provides a greater probability for success than either on its own. In a previous post I looked at why using a Linux/BSD kernal was a good idea so I won't go into the details. The difference between now and then is that having the Yahoo engineers makes the probabilty of sucess so much greater and faster.

Dropping the W32 kernal would be at least as radical shift in corporate strategy as Microsoft's turn around in the late 1990s to the web. We know the company can do radical strategy shifts and this would be the most radical and risky. But without doing something like this Microsoft is always going to struggle in a networked world.

I would honestly like to see this happen. It would be the single biggest threat to Google's dominance by stripping away the competitive advantage that open source provides the company.

Tags: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, OS, Open Source, Strategy, Disruption

Facebook - the next x?

The blogsphere has oscillated between hysteria and backlash against Facebook since the release of the Facebook platform. Some have asked, what is so special about Facebook while others have breathlesssly compared Facebook to Google, Apple & Microsoft.

Now, I personally think the underlying value of Facebook is enormous. However, capturing that value or more accurately realising that value for both the company and users is going to be difficult. More importantly, this will be massively more difficult while people keep talking about Facebook being the next "wunderkin."

Put another way, Facebook is not and never will be Google or Apple or Microsoft or any other wunderkin company. It will be its own wunderkin company that charts a new direction for the industry just as the others have before it. Any punter that talks about Facebook being the next x, will completely and thoroughly miss what Facebook is and will achieve. Do not trust them. These punters are still stuck in the old world and will fail to see the new world.