⇥ Microsoft is and Microsoft does

Every year, Microsoft organizes a small event, called Web Development Summit, to which they invite a few members of the PHP community. The WDS is a good opportunity to exchange information with Microsoft, learn about new products they are working on and generally catch up with a number of friends from the community. Several others have already posted their impressions of this year’s meeting, to which I add my own.

Good stuff

Microsoft’s attitude towards open-source has changed considerably over the last few years—a fact that is finally starting to permeate through its historical insistence on vertical integration in favour of more willingness to integrate its products with other platforms. At the end of the day, Microsoft has realized that the key to improving adoption of Windows Server—and, more importantly, stemming the migration away from it—is to play nice with other technologies.

More importantly (at least from my perspective), more people within Microsoft are finally realizing that working within the open-source world requires a shift in the way they establish relationships and position themselves. There are some within the company that have realized this a long time ago and have, as a result, established some strong ties with the PHP community; it’s good to see that this frame of mind is finally permeating through the organization and changing the way it approaches its dealings with us.

The willingness to look beyond its own walls is also making it possible for Microsoft to come up with some truly innovative and useful products. One of the most impressive ones that I saw during the WDS is Expression Web‘s SuperPreview¹, which truly simplifies the process of side-by-side comparison between browsers, including multiple versions of Internet Explorer. I was teaching a seminar of HTML and CSS at a client just yesterday and had an opportunity to show this product to them. It was received with a chorus of wows, followed by significant gnashing of teeth when they realized that their organization’s default Windows install wouldn’t support it.

I also truly appreciated the fact that the evangelists who were at WDS took the time to really drive home the fact that “Microsoft” is not one entity, but, rather, a conglomerate of many different divisions and people—and, therefore, of many different opinions and strategic views that are bound, at times, to be in conflict with one another. To anyone who has had the opportunity to work for (or with) a large organization, this is an obvious fact—but many who are used to smaller work environments don’t fully understand the complexities of interacting with such a large base of coworkers, each with their own priorities and strategies (I always chuckle when I hear someone start a sentence with “You Microsoft guys need to…”).

Finally, I had the pleasure of leading a ten-minute discussion on the status of the PHP community, which, judging from the reactions that it received, was a cathartic experience for some people. I took advantage of the unusual convergence of members from various PHP-related groups, including Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, to point out that it might be opportune for all of these communities to intermingle and work together with the “core” PHP community towards common goals to ensure a good exchange of ideas. After all, what comes down the pipe from core will eventually be of benefit (or not) to anyone whose application lives downstream, so a feedback channel in the form of conversations and participation is going to be essential to the health of the entire PHP ecosystem².

Not so good stuff

The whole point of the WDS was to give Microsoft an opportunity to present their current ideas to a small focus group so that they would have an opportunity to revise and focus their message before presenting it to the world at large; therefore, it would be inappropriate for me to comment specifically on the areas for improvement that we saw.

Suffice it to say that some divisions inside Microsoft are still finding it difficult to let go of the no longer appropriate view of open-source communities are a ragtag group of renegades intent on not-so-subtly subverting the commercial software landscape. By my own guesstimate-based account, the 40 or so people at WDS directly or indirectly represented at least a good $100M of annual sales (the number actually jumped by several hundred millions halfway through, but I’m not counting that), all made possible by the use of open-source software. These people are not trying to make a philosophical point—they are simply trying to achieve specific goals with the best tools at their disposal. Microsoft employees simply need to learn to see us as partners, and not as gifted amateurs with a source-code fetish.

By the same token, if we decide to engage with companies like Microsoft, it’s important to make an effort to understand the unique challenges that they must face, internally and externally, in order to work with us. Obviously, we can’t solve their problems—but if we don’t even bother finding out what they are, we are not being good community citizens, either.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a customer of both MTA and Blue Parabola, and they paid most of my expenses to attend the WDS.

¹ Of course, SuperPreview (which, to me, is the killer feature in Expression Web) is not even listed in the top-three features on the product page. Disconnect, anyone?

² On a personal note, I was happy to see that my ability to drive an entire room full of people up the wall in ten minutes or less has not waned with the years. My intention was to stir emotions—and that’s exactly what I accomplished.