Artificial ignorance

I woke up this morning, and as I usually do, I fired up Techmeme and found this article by Matt Asay titled “Microsoft search to be powered by open source”. Matt’s a good journalist, but as I’ve done before (How to get TechMeme’d – write about something bashing Vista), I want to comment on some of Asay’s points.

It looks like Microsoft’s anti-open-source bubble really has burst.

Our anti-open-source bubble, Matt? For a writer who has written about our Open Source strategies a few times, I’m surprised to read that Asay thinks we have an “anti-open-source bubble”. And to quote Asay himself from an article titled “Muglia: Open Source to permeate Microsoft” he’d written in February ‘09 (about 3 months ago):

The reality is that more and more of Microsoft’s products already do include open-source software (including MSN Messenger and Visual Studio), but it’s still refreshing to hear Microsoft acknowledge what most enterprise software companies–including proprietary software companies with much to lose from open source–already know: open source is mainstream.

In 2006, Gartner talked about the importance of code reuse, a phenomenon perfectly suited for open source. Microsoft, by acknowledging that it would rather borrow some open-source code than reinvent every software wheel, is simply being pragmatic.

Open source is not the "cancer" that Microsoft used to call it. It’s just a great, efficient way to develop and distribute software.

Welcome to reality, Microsoft. We’ve been patiently waiting for you to arrive.

While Powerset (and NLP capabilities) are definitely an important portion of our search offerings, it’d be a stretch to deduce from the Register’s original article on Powerset using Hadoop (which is a phenomenal framework for data intensive apps, I might add) that “open-source software appears to be the default choice”. I honestly don’t know what the default choice is, but as several of our senior leaders have said before, you should use the tools that help you do your job best. And I want to reiterate, Microsoft is not against Open Source technologies (see my post “Microsoft Software and Open Source – not mutually exclusive”).

And somehow in between all this, Asay refers to CIO.com’s article about “Microsoft losing its focus” not really clarifying how or what this has to do with Powerset using Hadoop.

I’ve seen FUD like this being spread before – there was this article back in 2005: “It’s unofficial: Microsoft bets business on Linux”. I was excited when I learned that we’d added Powerset to the Microsoft family, and it so happens that Powerset had chosen to use Open Source technologies as they built out their product. Microsoft’s focus is to do what it takes to build out a good online business, of which search is a core part.

Oh, and as for “prime rival Google embraces open source unreservedly”, I happened to notice that Dave McClure’s tweet seems to have gotten retweeted quite a bit:

Update (5/8/09, 2pm PDT): According to Asay’s tweets, it appears that Asay was in fact looking to write an article that would be “inaccurate” and “not boring”:

And it appears that tweet was in response to this one by @offwhitemke:

“ai”

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