MicroHoo: Welcome to Open Source, Microsoft
While nearly all of the analysis of Microsoft’s offer to acquire Yahoo! for close to $45 billion has centered on the Redmond giant’s intent to compete with Google for online advertising dollars, swallowing Yahoo! would also plant Microsoft squarely in the middle of the open source software arena. 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. As Mike and Bob noted in their excellent debate yesterday, 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!—it’s 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.
Do you agree, or would Microsoft acquiring Yahoo! be bad news for open source?
I disagree — Neither.
And I believe you’re confusing open protocols with open source. Microsoft has plenty of experience with open protocols. There’s nothing new to see there.
Microsoft acquiring Yahoo! will be irrelevant to open source. While Yahoo! is a great open source based player, they’re not by any stretch one of the major drivers.
Much of what Yahoo offers is API access to their services. Other contributions they’ve made (like YUI a javascript/css library) stand on their own and will outlive the company. Products like Konfabulator are no different than Microsoft providing Visual Studio Express or Adobe providing AIR. Further Konfabulator has never really grown to reach it’s potential.
Nor is Microsoft going to change it’s spots and become more open source friendly. What will happen in the short term is the creation of a company divided, with Microsoft’s war chest diffused, many of Yahoo’s best and brightest eventually landing elsewhere and another service to be reimplemented with Microsoft technology and Microsoft philosophy.
And worse than being unable to change, Microsoft will force it’s culture into what’s left of Yahoo. The first to leave Yahoo will likely be the company’s most brightly shining lights as other companies seize the opportunity created by the uncertainty of the merger to capture talent. What’s left will be dominated by the hangers-on. As the thought leadership finds new opportunities, Microsoft WILL be looking to make the costly re-enginering effot to replace Yahoo’s backend infrastructure with Microsoft products in order to avoid the marketing embarrassment of their highest profile purchase being almost entirely free of their own products.
The result of combining the #2 player (Yahoo) and the #3 player (MSN) will simply result in an even weaker #2 player once Yahoo loses what vision and talent it had that made it better than Microsoft in the first place.
Dave
hey now, i said “microhoo!” this morning. i call prior art! :P
Microsoft’s experience in doing APIs and third-party developer outreach crushes Yahoo’s like a grape (and as the guy who started Yahoo’s developer program, I should know).
It’s not the case that this notion of open source is foreign to Microsoft; they’ve been gradually embracing the concept over the past few years, and two of their licenses were certified as real open source licenses by OSI late last year.
“many of Yahoo’s best and brightest eventually landing elsewhere”
Exactly right. Can we say Facebook, MySpace, or Google? Microhoo will suck.
I do not think that Microsoft will embrace open source, regardless of how you view its importance at Yahoo. This just points one of many conflicts in the strategy of combining the two companies. Strategically, I think Microsoft is making a mistake. My further thoughts are at http://sophisticatedfinance.typepad.com/sophisticated_finance/2008/02/microsoft-yahoo.html
Didn’t I remember Microsoft having this problem when they acquired Hotmail? I seem to recall that the Hotmail folks were using some form of *nix, and Microsoft’s determination to ‘eat their own dogfood’ resulted in some unexpected downtime — and they had to flip the switch back to the old non-MS systems for a while to beef up their own integrity and scalability. But the point is, Microsoft eventually did do just that — eradicate the need for non-Microsoft technology. ‘We are NOMAD…’
Working for Yahoo at the moment must be tedious as it is hard to predict what will happen in the next months. I agree that Microsoft will eventually try to put its mark everywhere, but it will be a long process.
However, when buying a company, people are its most valuable asset. And it is certain that Microsoft is interested in the Yahoo talent. Therefore, the possibility of people leaving in great numbers is not a certainty in my opinion.
http://electronrun.wordpress.com/
And so the exodus begins…
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/12/yahoo-exec-bails-bradley-horowitz-leaves-for-google/