Four legs good; two legs bad -- the WSA Panel today

Following up from an earlier post ... today at the WSA Investment Forum 2005, I sat on a panel that discussed: Platform Wars: A Civilized Conversation on the Best Solution

Moderator: Frank Catalano, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Pearson Assessments & Testing

Panelists:

- Stuart Cohen, CEO, Open Source Development Labs

- Cliff Reeves, General Manager, Microsoft .NET Platform Strategy, Microsoft Corporation

- Bill Vass, Chief Information Officer and Vice President, Information Technology, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The panel was pretty tame -- in my experience they usually are --  but there was a little sloganeering here and there. with items like: "use open source software to avoid vendor lock-in," and "the Chinese government won't use proprietary software because they can't see the source."

Frank Catalano, the moderator, asked good questions and kept the discussion moving along.

Here's the list of questions, and a highly personal view of the highlights

- How would you define "open standards" from your perspective? ... I got to start and made a reasoned case that open implied "you can be confident that they are stable and long-lived," and that standards meant "widely available and widely supported." That enfranchises everything from IETF, through WS-I and de facto standards from Intel, Microsoft, others.
- Areas where hype has overtaken reality ... Stuart Cohen made the point that in many cases, open software (like Linux) was part of a commercial endeavour, and that there was a lot more proprietary software running on open software, than there actually is open software. He observed, a few times throughout, that open source does not mean "non-commercial."
- Sweet (and bad) spots for each platform ... Stuart noted that highly mobile platforms (like PDAs and laptops) would not yield easily or soon to open source platforms like Linux because of the deep function and additional applications that market demands. He was very bullish about Linux in the server space, though, and in some devices.

For my part, I suggested that an ISV building a hosted service might not see a Windows stack as optimal because of a need to be self-sufficient for tuning and service. Also, a licensed (even inexpensive) OS might be suboptimal in a low marging high-volume appliance or device. On the other hand, a platform like Windows is ideal in mass markets where add-on appkications are valued, and in critical business envrionmenst where strong support/service was necessary. Bll Vass didn't identify any areas where open source systems are not ideal :-)
- Realities of interoperability or homogeneity .. the panel pretty much agreed on heterogeneity, for a number of reasons. There are many reasons open source exists, not the least of which is that it's the obvious way to share technology that is funded by public money -- like government research.
- Possibility of current platforms being blindsided by something new ... no real insights here, although I called out Web 2.0 as something Microsoft hasn't yet come to grips with.

At one point, Bill Vass mentioned that Solaris was now Open Source. I suggested that was perhaps because it no longer had any value. This may have been mean of me.

Any way, fun panel, nice guys. Super job, Frank.