August 20th, 2007

Microsoft and Open Source: Kissing cousins

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 1:28 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Open Source

Tags: Open Source, Microsoft Corp., Xandros, Maurene Caplan Grey

In early 1994, the World Wide Web opened the gates of Internet travel for the average person — the same year that the Netscape Navigator browser was released. By mid-1994, millions of PC users were riding the “information highway.”

On December 7, 1995, Microsoft announced its plans for the quantum leap to Internet time.

“The thing that really motivates us is paranoia and competition,” says [Paul A.] Maritz [Microsoft group vice-president for platforms]. The day after Microsoft’s Dec. 7 splash, Netscape CEO James L. Barksdale was asked about the threat Microsoft posed. His joking response: “God is on our side.” That was like putting a match to dry kindling. “It’s the kind of stuff that gets people up in a locker room,” says [Brad] Silverberg, who now heads Microsoft’s Internet division. “I want to thank Netscape. All this trash talk helped get us motivated.”

Today, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominates the Web browser market. Read the rest of this entry »

August 2nd, 2007

Xandros and Scalix: A marriage of convenience

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 1:08 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Messaging, Open Source

Tags: Scalix Corp., Xandros, Maurene Caplan Grey

Today’s trivia-by-association question: I say, “Linux.” Quick, what’s your first thought? …  

Xandros is gambling that their transition from a desktop Linux player to an end-to-end Linux platform player will drive Xandros mindshare, so as to position them with the Linux “big boys.” Given the voluminous number of Linux distributions, Xandros’s ambition is lofty — but not insurmountable.

In 2004, Xandros stepped into the server market, and progressively built out their infrastructure platform.

Meanwhile in the Scalix camp, founder Julie Hanna Farris had been skillfully, and aggressively, marketing Scalix as the ”Exchange Killer.“ As ZDNet’s David Berlind wrote back in 2005:

For Scalix’s first trick, it offered an Exchange-compatible e-mail and calendaring server for a fraction of the cost of what it takes to run Exchange.

Though certainly one of the more prevalent voices in the messaging/collaboration world, Scalix hardly has been alone Read the rest of this entry »

April 9th, 2007

How Open Source Email is Gaining Respectability

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 3:15 pm

Categories: Email, Messaging, Open Source, Web 2.0

Tags:

Not so long ago, only the residents of Geekdom (usually in academia) would attempt to architect an entirely open source email system. Architects normally assembled the system from an à la carte menu of email system parts. Hooking the pieces together required an in-depth knowledge of email protocols and mail flow. (If you are a wannabe email geek, here's Carnegie Mellon's email system architecture.)

All too often, however, the architect may not have adequately documented the structure. The architect relies on the respective open source community of each part (e.g., IMAP or OpenLDAP) for support. Community members do assist each other, but the support may not be timely enough for a production problem. Consequently, an open source "build it" model for email is a scary venture – particularly as businesses are so reliant on email communication.

Tarnished creditability is difficult to clean up.   

Nearly 100 percent of organizations have an email system, of which approximately 80 percent use IBM Domino or Microsoft Exchange. The remaining 20 percent are using systems from established vendors, e.g., Gordano, Ipswitch, Mirapoint, Novell (GroupWise), Oracle, Sun and many others. So… why would a vendor want to introduce a new email system into a market that is 100 percent saturated?

The commercial arm of an open source community (e.g., Sendmail.com versus Sendmail.org) is an active participant in the community, while providing for-fee enterprise-level support, packaging and upgrades. 

Start-ups with commercial open source email and messaging systems are gambling their futures on changing organizational beliefs about open source.

Nat Torkington's blog post Open Source Trends discusses four emerging trends about open source overall (underscores mine):

• Adoption - we've written the main apps, now the real challenges lay in convincing users to adopt it. Usability, marketing, and support.
• Freedom Wins - there are crappy business models built around half-hearted adoption of open source. Embrace open source's strengths, don't treat it as a weakness.
• Web 2.0 is Open Source - the web is built on open source, and the scaling and platform challenges for Web 2.0 are the challenges for open source.
• Open Beyond Source - the best practices of open source extending to proprietary software development, hardware, and data. 

Open source start-ups are riding on the wings of "computing freedom." Computing freedom is a reshaping of how technology is designed and implemented. It leverages the individual's relationship within a group (or community). Computing freedom is as much about social change as it is about technology change.

In the big picture, new open source email and messaging entrants, e.g., Jabber, Jive Software, Open-Xchange, Scalix and Zimbra, must "stay the course." The established email and messaging vendors see that open source is gaining respectability and, therefore, are building open source into their existing systems.

April 2nd, 2007

Can Zimbra Encroach Upon the Enterprise Messaging Market?

Posted by Maurene Caplan Grey @ 10:22 am

Categories: Collaboration, Email, Messaging, Open Source, Web 2.0

Tags:

Zimbra is a powerhouse at marketing and public relations. Each Zimbra "event" (like last week's announcement of its desktop client)  results in a flood of media coverage. Marketing- and public relations-driven perception is a top-down approach to drive "radar" mindshare. Evidence of earnest creditability is the bottom-up approach that drives a sustainable customer base. The bottom-up approach is the more impregnable strategy to develop and implement. The consequence of a weak bottom-up strategy is ultimate failure.

The consensus of the Blogosphere and Internet journalists is that the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) server, Web client and the  Zimbra desktop client are all goodness.

Bottom-up…

• Zimbra is sexy. Its Web services architecture aligns with the current excitement over anything "2.0." Its "zimlets" ("hooks" for integrating ZCS with third-party applications) can also be used to create Web-based mash-up user interfaces.
• Zimbra is open source. Open source has shed its legacy, disparaging image in the enterprise. ZCS comes in two flavors: open source community (Open Source Edition), which is free. Community development feeds the for-fee commercialized version (Network Edition) — more suited to the enterprise.
• Zimbra has "cool" features. For example, you can mouse over URLs and certain words, which are linked to other sources of information.  

Innovation for productivity's sake supports a positive bottom-up strategy — and if the innovation just happens to be fun, so much the better. Though a start-up, Zimbra is not swimming in the same sea as the 2.0 "wannabes."

Back in the "real world," though, the vast majority of businesses spend money on Read the rest of this entry »