21st Century Enterprise - Microsoft Should Have Gone Open Source Long Ago (Part 2)

On the other hand, Microsoft has been more careful despite their investments in hardware initiatives whether its acquisition of Nokia, building Surface products or creating game consoles. But they too
followed the same suite like Sun when MS introduced .NET framework to make platform the king at server side. This paid really well to MS in enterprise space because MS did provide a good value of investment. But at mid, small to micro business level it back fired by giving away a huge market share to Linux. Try finding out what kind of web server local businesses are running their websites on and you will see the problem right away.

Since, its more expensive to host a simple website on Windows Server, the demand from small business gave a huge traction to Linux, or I would say Microsoft themselves gave a cutting edge to Linux against the Windows platform. The cost effectiveness of Linux based platform and strong ecosystem of open source Java, PHP, Python is what made so many cloud vendors so successful to provide basic productivity apps at either extremely low cost or sometimes at no cost at all.

Future belongs to SaaS and those SaaS solutions which are not only rich in functionality but must be running on cost effective platforms. To address this gap, MS has made .NET Core as open source. This is a good start for MS but not sufficient to compete against Linux, Java, PHP and Python. Client side and tooling is a space which is usually overlooked and are the real magnet for developers, something where MS really shines. MS already has some of worlds finest client side technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation, programming models for rich interfaces and Visual Studio. Making such client side technologies available on Mac and Linux can really make a big difference to achieve what MS needs.

MS has for sure taken the right step in the right direction but I think, it will take MS sometime to make .NET a true cross platform programming framework with a strong ecosystem around it. Don't forget Java went open source almost eight years ago and now it stands strong because of the help from open source community and the resulted ecosystem around it.

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