I was attending a business meeting, when the topic started to shift to open source.  And one of the attendees started saying, ” of course, Wilson Ng has been a Microsoft advocate and partner, and we do expect him to oppose open source.”  I grimaced and shrugged.  I have often been characterized as such.  But I believe that I have grown old enough in the industry that I have stopped looking at things as black and white, and start to be more circumspect.

Looking at things objectively means you understand that generalizations tend to be wrong, and it often is.  Not all Americans are angels, and not all 3rd world officials are corrupt or incompetent.  Not every thing  Microsoft does is bad, and defective software do not automatically become good when labeled as open source. 

After doing business with Microsoft over the last dozen or so years, I can say that  Microsoft is not  some sort of evil giant, as you would see in a movie, it is a business consisting of tens of thousands of employees  that tries hard to produce products and services that consumers will want to pay for.  And just like most companies, there are people you like, and people who can also be frustrating to do business with.

Of course, just like a lover’s quarrel tend to be magnified when it is between mega movie stars, things do get a little bit overblown because after all, Microsoft was probably the most successful and visible technology company to succeed in the 80s and 90s, and to this day, still has a commanding market share in computer operating systems, as well as office applications.  And it produced for quite sometime the world’s richest man, Bill Gates.  For this, it automatically became the company many love to hate.

As a friend wrily observes, ” In the United States, you are not important enough  until you have your own hate forum, and you are sued!“

But  I believe that Bill Gates legacy isn’t really because he headed the world’s biggest software company, or that he earned or give away the most money.  What I believe we will remember him for, was that he created the software industry as we know it, and I believe legions of programmers have him to thank for it.

If you remember, the personal computer industry started off as buying computer kits, assembling them, and selling them.  The software was something that people created to share, not to make money.   The world’s biggest computer companies created software to sell its hardware. 

When Bill Gates suggested that the software should be paid for, the members of the then HomeBrew Computer Club, where he showed off his software were all surprised.  You have to pay for software?  That was unheard of!  Bill was one of the pioneers who said that he would create a company of something that used to given away, and became rich in the process.

Bill showed them that there was value in the software itself, and soon, more and more software companies were founded on that premise – and pretty soon, it was not unusual now to soon have situations where the software prices were even more than the hardware.  He was one of the pioneers who showed that the intangible could be more valuable, the intellectual property was more important than the physical property.

I can imagine millions of developers simply started off with a simple logic, ” I want to be a programmer.  I want to be in software!” ” Why do I want to be in software?”  ” Look, the world’s richest man is a techie!  The industry is cool! And you can earn! “.   And that providing inspirations to millions of people saying a nerd can be rich and cool, fueling the techie’s hope that there is money in software, will be Bill’s lasting legacy.

Of course, eventually, there is the open source movement that says maybe we should also create software that we can freely share…  Nothing wrong with that.  But they should recognize that they are generous because earlier developments have made software the valuable commodity that it is, and for most of software developers relatively well off that they can now think of sharing some of their blessings without the need to think of earning something back.

If Microsoft used to strong arm itself to partners and competitors before, it does seem to recognize that such may not provide long term value. Microsoft of late has been trying to fix its public image, and it is throwing a lot of resources now to make sure its products interoperate well with other open source technologies like Linux, or PHP.  One of the things that is still proprietary is its Microsoft office file format.  These are the word, spreadsheets, and powerpoint files that are used by over 500 million people in this planet.  Various governments recommended that Microsoft should standardize their formats so that other software will know how to open and close these formats, and will also have royalty free access to that information.  To this end, Microsoft decided to publish the Office Open XML format.  Unfortunately, this format is now to be certified by ISO, but is meeting opposition.  It does look like full interoperability with Microsoft Office may remain elusive, but this time, it may not be entirely Microsoft’s refusal to tango.  Try to do a search on OOXML and read more about this issue as it goes into vote next month.