The irony of Ballmer's projected buying spree
I've been thinking through Ballmer's comments that he'll buy 20 Web 2.0 companies each year over the next five years, and a biting irony just hit me: Web 2.0 is all about collaboration and architecture of participation. Web 2.0 grows through community. Ballmer plans to get into this market by buying communities...
...which implies that he's not very good at building them. Now, some will cry "Foul!" given the rich partner ecosystem that Microsoft has grown over the years. But Microsoft's extant partner ecosystem is very different from the kind of community that open source and Web 2.0 fosters.
Perhaps instead of focusing on buying the web, Ballmer would do better to change his employee demographics such that Microsoft could build the web? This would require an open-source approach to community building. It would require Microsoft to be a very different company from the one that it is.
Even if Ballmer is able to bulldoze his way into the Web 2.0 market by acquisition, I'm not convinced that web communities are something that is susceptible to hostile takeover. Ballmer may end up with great properties...and no one to populate them.
In short, open source and Web 2.0 can't be forced. They're community-based, both of them. Microsoft must first learn community before it can effectively build or buy communities.
Savio
Maybe Ballmer is not thinking about joining the Web through the acquisition of communities? Maybe he's thinking about purchasing those communities with the intent of moving the underlying Web technologies from W3C Open Internet Standards to MS Stack proprietary technologies? If he can do this without breaking up the communities, there is perhaps a method to his $100 Billion dollar madness.
We've been watching the emergence of the MS Stack for some time now, and one thing is becoming increasing clear; W3C technologies are being replaced by proprietary protocols, methods, and dependencies. The lead technologies in the MS Stack of desktop, server, device and web information systems are MS-OOXML, Smart Tags, XAML, the .NET libraries, and soon enough, Silverlight.
In particular, it's hard not to notice that MS-OOXML is used to replace HTML within the MS Stack.
OK, so perhaps the purpose of the Web 2.0 acquisition spree is to quickly populate the web end of the MS Stack? These communities would be tacked onto the MS Stack of proprietary applications through accelerated interoperability components with "MS-OOXML with Smart Tags" leading the way.
Imagine these "acquired communities" having fluid document exchange and collaboration with the MSOffice - Outlook desktop, and the Exchange/SharePoint developers hub.
Imagine they hang off the E/S hub as collaborative application services easily integrated at the document/messaging/calendar/workflow/data binding layer.
I was fortunate enough to attend the recent Office 2.0 conference where the excitement all kinds of collaborative computing initiatives overflowed the conference, and spilled out into the streets of San Francisco's SOMA district. So many companies with so much promise. Yet, it was obvious that they all (except one, Think Farmer), shared the same problem of integrating into existing business processes based on the MSOffice desktop.
There is no question that Microsoft is busy migrating these MSOffice - Outlook desktop bound business processes to the Exchange/SharePoint developers hub. The E/S hub sits at the center of the MS Stack. And, in spite of continued anti trust efforts, Microsoft has managed to reserve for themselves the interop - integration API's that everyone at the Office 2.0 Conference has to have access to to succeed.
The problem is this; the Office 2.0 apps provide collaborative community features outside existing business processes. There isn't much they can do about this, so they forge ahead hoping that the collaboration value will trump the efficiencies of integration. As the Office 2.0 crowd puts their sweat and equity into building out this new computing category, Microsoft can afford to sit back and watch, knowing that at any time they can step in with "collaboration plus integration", and walk away with the category.
We saw exactly this same thing happen in the early 90's with the emergence of Windows and MSOffice.
The acquisition announcement might indicate that Microsoft now feels the collaborative computing category has reached enough critical mass to be profitable. Or, they might be thinking that now is the time to carve up the Internet, replacing core W3C technologies with their proprietary stable of embrace, eXtend, extinguish MS Stack specific designs.
Unfortunately, i think it's the latter. The purpose of MS-OOXML is not to stop ODF. The purpose is to replace HTML. With the end game being the Internet itself.
~ge~