How Microsoft Learned Its Open Lessons

Microsoft has been variously derided, castigated and scorned over the years for its domination tactics, its latent Linux awakening and let’s not forget ‘Clippy’ the Office assistant while we’re twisting the knife.

The trouble with Microsoft is, despite the insight into how its software development methodologies work offered by membership to the MSDN network resources, the firm doesn’t always talk that publically about its internal thought processes. Of course that trend is changing and so long serving (should that be suffering?) executives like Amanda Silver are spending more time talking to the media.

Silver is director of program management for Visual Studio at Microsoft -- basically the platform and tools that allow developers to build any kind of client application. She has been with the firm since leaving college in 2001 and has lived through the Ballmer years.

Given those two normally substantially influencing factors, one would imagine that Silver has drunk a lot of Redmond Kool-Aid.

Kool-Aid, anyone?

So how does someone in this now quite technically senior role view the process of the big ship Microsoft turning around onto its new course?

"I’ve seen a huge transformation at Microsoft and I definitely think that Satya [Nadella, the CEO] coming in changed some things, but I would say that a lot of the changes were actually underway before his time. I started getting involved in web development working on Chakra, which is the JavaScript engine that runs behind Edge. The Office team was in the midst of trying to move forward the Office client software and prepare it for Office 365 cloud subscriptions. To do that they had to take a codebase that was 20-years old and written in C++ and C# and then get thousands of developers to start writing code that would run in the browser,” said Silver.

Silver appears to express a sentiment for this longer-term trend that the company had been working towards having (obviously) seen the growth of cloud and online for some years. The change to cloud and the new openness was clearly tough - but how tough?

“When you look at ‘unextractable application components’ like the Excel computation engine, these stay broadly the same when we move to cloud and online. But there are a ton of changes to areas like the User Interface (UI) where we need to build new code -- we also need tune the ‘runtime’ of the application to understand how it will behave in commonly used browsers [not just Microsoft’s],” said Silver.

Right so that’s the change to cloud, what about the new openness? Silver describes the challenge of using JavaScript at the level that Microsoft wanted to use it. The language didn’t have the appropriate ‘boundary controls’ and other management factors that Redmond was demanding. Although Microsoft was happy to work on the standards body to evolve JavaScript, Silver says that committees move slowly and so the firm took a few assertive decisions.

The TypeScript factor

The community committee latency factor is part of what led to the creation of TypeScript, which has always been positioned by Microsoft as JavaScript that scales. TypeScript starts from the same syntax and semantics that millions of JavaScript developers already know.

“But we knew it would be a really bad idea if the Office365 team was the only ‘customer’ for TypeScript in terms of its wider potential to be able to evolve. At the time, Microsoft really didn’t have a position of respect in the broader web development community. So we needed a way of bringing it to market that would not alienate this community that we were trying to talk to and get traction with. This community expected open source, they expected to be able to push contributions back -- so we knew that open was the only option. At the time, Microsoft was still not really embracing open source although we did have a team working on open technologies,” said Silver.

The challenge for Microsoft was finding a way to ship the project in a way that would work in a community that it didn’t have a lot of credit in -- and, all of this, was under Steve Ballmer… the man that used to say rude things about Linux.

Silver explains that Microsoft also learned that it had to post its design process online if it was going to a) build credibility b) successfully accept feature contributions from the open source community c) refine and evolve products in the open arena.

The danger of the forking factor

These changes did not just happen overnight, we are talking more about a period of months to a year(s). But this open learning lesson with TypeScript helped Microsoft learn that it also needed to open source its .NET software programming model.

“We know now that its tough to do these things,” agreed Silver. “We know that when you open source that there is always a danger that someone is going to run away with the project and ‘fork it’ and that that fork could end up being more popular. The only way you can be successful with open source in this sense is to be responsive to the community,” she said.

Microsoft’s Silver insists that it has continued to develop its open approach and even started to work on projects originated and controlled outside of the firm itself such as Apache Cordova. It has been working on the core of the Cordova runtime and its surrounding ecosystems plug in. Then of course there was the Xamarin story too -- a project that was open source, was taken closed source to build the Xamarin business… and was ultimately then open sourced by Microsoft.

Did you grab a Kool-Aid yet and submit to the all powerful beast... or does this smack of Microsoft finding out too little too late that it HAD to work like this?

You can still read the musings of the interdisciplinary haters who would not even afford Microsoft the chance to try and tell its story -- and you can chastise the firm for its licensing approach in open source circles if you think webmink about this tale, as you indeed should i.e. keep your eyes and ears open to every side of this story.

That’s what openness means anyway, right?