Microsoft’s Bill Hilf reveals its open source strategy

Since coming to Microsoft from IBM in 2003, Hilf has been inextricably involved with Microsoft’s strategy for dealing with Linux. He’s recently been appointed general manager of Windows Server marketing and platform strategy, which means he’s taking on an expanded role, but open source is still one of his core issues.

Years ago, Microsoft had a very specific interpretation of what open source is. Open source and Linux were sort of synonymous and it was sort of a specter-like ghost. A lot of what I’ve done over the past four years is help to parse out two issues: Where do we cooperate and where's the value for our company in participating, and where specifically do we compete head-to-head and make sure there’s no grayness around that?

We compete specifically with things like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The software that goes into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we may or may not compete with at a feature level, but the real value of open source from Microsoft is understanding how community developed software can happen on our platform and help grow our business as well as the open source community, which is how we started off on this whole path of launching things like Port25 and CodePlex, and which is why I submitted the licenses to the OSI.

When people buy commercial software, really what they're buying is a guarantee. You’re buying a guarantee that what you have will perform, and has been tested and there’s someone you can call up, and if things go really bad someone’s liable if something doesn’t work. You’re buying this ecosystem of accountability. One of the challenges of open source and really the challenge with the open source business model is: it’s hard to replicate that ecosystem of accountability and that guarantee.

Red Hat’s been really the only proof that somebody can provide an overlay support service, and even then, I don’t know that it's even that significant of a proof. The community itself is the value of open source, not any one vendor who’s participating in it. I think a lot of people get lost in the software, the source code part of it. What we’ve been doing strategically is try to figure out how do we participate in that community as a good citizen so that we’re in that sort of same value chain. We did the same thing at IBM. There’s lots of participation of IBM in open source, but there’s very little shared source code between IBM’s shipping products and open source software.

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Mobile Internet: the wireless convergence

The national telecommunications industry has experienced some strife in recent days. Weighed down by regulatory issues to do with a once-government-owned incumbent copper network, international comparisons of Australian broadband pricing and availability have proved to be embarrassing at best.

But while Telstra and the recently formed Group of Nine tiptoe through a tangle of broadband regulations and negotiations with the ACCC, other telecommunications service providers are treading into a brave new world of wireless communications.

Since the launch of Hutchison’s third-generation mobile network in April 2003, mobile telecommunications service providers have expanded their offerings from traditional voice calling to include video calls, multimedia downloads and Internet access.

According to 2007 survey results from the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association’s (AIMIA) Australia Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index, 30 percent of survey respondents reported using 3G technology, reflecting an 11 per cent growth in 3G penetration from previous years' results.

While voice calls and SMS were found to be the most frequently used services, survey participants also reported having used their phones for MMS, content downloads, and video calling. Seven per cent of survey respondents used their mobile phones for sending and receiving e-mail.

Speaking at a wireless discussion organised by the Australian Telecommunications Users Group (ATUG) last week, AIMIA’s Head of Mobile Claudia Sagripanti said that while 11 per cent of Australians are reportedly accessing the Internet via their mobile phones, public uptake of the technology remains deterred by cost.

“Data charges are a big issue for consumers because they [consumers] don’t know exactly how much they are being charged,” she said.
But cost is not likely to be an issue for long, as service providers race to deliver networks that are faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever before.

When Telstra launched its $1 billion Next G network in October 2006, the network claimed to reach 98.8 per cent of the Australian population, delivering voice and broadband services at speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps. The network has since been upgraded to deliver speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps, and is expected to reach speeds of up to 40 Mbps by next year.

Hutchison too upgraded its 3G mobile network in February last year to incorporate High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology, increasing the network’s maximum download speed to 3.6 Mbps.

Mobile telecommunications are expected to heat up as Optus and Vodafone prepare to launch their own 3G networks by the end of the year.

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