Recession is an opportunity: Microsoft

Recession is an opportunity: Microsoft

This economic slowdown is beginning to hit all businesses, and the impact this quarter will be significant says, Tarun Gulati

Thursday, February 19, 2009

BANGALORE, INDIA: Surviving the recession is top priority for any IT company. Organisations are opting for various avenues to tackle the recession, while few of them are playing wait and watch.

Some say, this recession is small as compared to previous recessions in 2001 and 1990 and few believe in being optimistic to prepare for the worst.

To overcome the situation, industry analysts opine that adoption of open source software will benefit IT industry and with the latest survey reports, we can see large amount of developer community adopting open source software for day-to-day work.

In an interaction with Abhigna N G from CIOL, Tarun Gulati, general manager, Business Strategy, Marketing and Operations Microsoft India talked about the views of Microsoft in adoption of open source software, way forward for proprietary software versus open source products.

75 pc developers employ open source in APAC

Gulati also talked about the products developed by Microsoft to increase developer productivity and the work being done at the Interoperability lab.

Excerpts:

CIOL: Industry analysts believe open source software will gain market share from proprietary software companies during the tougher economic times, how Microsoft is prepared to compete with competitors?

Tarun Gulati: If I understand correctly you mean Linux over Windows operating system. If we look at the facts, Windows continues to lead in the consumer PC segment as also validated by various 3rd party studies such as IDC.

One of the reasons why anyone looks at Linux is the perception that it is free. However, various studies have clearly shown that it is actually more expensive over 3 to 5 year time frame. And in today’s environment of economizing, customers are looking at higher long term ROI from every IT investment and not short-term benefits.

Top five trends in open source

It is also important to note that open source is not a product but rather an approach to software development. Microsoft does not compete with any model including open source model. We firmly believe that multiple platforms can and should co-exist and recognize both the advantages of open source and the fact that platform heterogeneity is a reality in today’s environment.

CIOL: Elaborate some of the open source technologies that Microsoft has adopted to increase developer productivity?

TG: Microsoft provides a combination of resources that enable developers to learn, be creative, and solve problems collaboratively, using whatever approach they choose. This commitment includes programs and partnerships to help developers connect with one another to collaborate and exchange ideas, including source code collaboration sites, such as CodePlex, as well as online communities for peer assistance.

Skyway Builder to increase developer productivity

Some of the open source applications available today are IronPython, ASP.NET AJAX, SharePoint Learning Kit, and WiX on CodePlex and SourceForge. Other initiatives and open source projects include:

* Silverlight, a cross platform, cross browser plug-in available on Mac
* Suse Linux Enterprise Server - Interoperability of Windows with Linux in partnership with Novell
* Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) to help organizations address the specific problems of porting UNIX- based applications to Windows
* Deki Wiki - first cross-platform open source wiki with application logic written entirely in the Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
* Windows Vista and Firefox interoperability in partnership with Mozilla
* In 1999, Microsoft developed Windows Installer XML (WiX). A pioneering open source project for Microsoft, WiX is now used widely by development teams in various industries to build installations
* Rotor was the first project with source code availability at Microsoft, which is a essentially a subset of ,NET framework.

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Collapse <div runat='server' id=Comm15390 class='CommentsContainer'><span class='commentsFrom' style='float:left;'>Ankith said on 2/20/2009 12:01:23 PM: </span><br/>Yes, its high time to think about adopting opensource in developing applications. Microsoft should also open source all the products, which will help us to implement better projects or applications without any investment. Hope microsoft will take my suggestion<div class='CommentLineContainer'><input type=button onClick='MoveComm(15390,ctl00_ctl00_ctl00_cphMainContentSection_cphMainContentSection_cphSection1ContentPart_ThreadedComments1_txtPid);' value='Reply'/> to Ankith </div>

Ankith said on 2/20/2009 12:01:23 PM:
Yes, its high time to think about adopting opensource in developing applications. Microsoft should also open source all the products, which will help us to implement better projects or applications without any investment. Hope microsoft will take my suggestion

to Ankith

Prakash said on 7/12/2009 9:22:01 AM:
WHy would Microsoft open source all the project? Who is going to be help accountable for the Intellectual property breach? Microsoft is not going to distribute the software free as developers inside the company works day in and out untiringly.

to Prakash