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Microsoft Programming Chief Julia Liuson: How We Moved From Windows Platform, To Any Platform

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A decade ago when Microsoft asked: Where do you want to go today? It didn't really mean we could go anywhere, in a truly open software sense of the term. They (it, the firm) really meant: Where do you want to go today within a Windows-specific 'proprietarily' closed platform of software using our applications, browser and tools? 

But that would have made a really shoddy marketing slogan.

Latterly, in an attempt to broaden, Microsoft moved on to use Windows Everywhere, but even this slogan has now become redundant. Today in late 2016, the firm has adopted a different tune and it is one of: Any developer, any app, any platform, at the software engineering and programming level at least, which ostensibly translates directly to the user level too.

Yes okay, obviously, Microsoft would still like all roads to lead back to Windows and its other platforms if occasionally possible -- Azure cloud, Office 365, .NET and its newer breed of cognitive services -- but something of a turnaround has occurred.

Turning the big ship around

A shift from focusing on proprietary platforms to embracing an open source approach doesn’t happen overnight and requires something much deeper than marketing slogans. The questions triggered by this big change are: how has the firm been re-engineering itself, what's life been like inside the big ship making the turnaround and can we see any holes in the argument it is now putting forward?

Julia Liuson is corporate vice president for Visual Studio at Microsoft and is responsible for developer tools and services, including all the firms programming languages and runtimes. In other words, she's the software boss at Microsoft.

Speaking at the company's recent Connect () 2016 event in New York, Liuson opened up on a few truths as she detailed the Microsoft journey from 'Linux is a cancer' (in the era of Ballmer) to 'any platform is cool by us' today.

Truth be told, many of the open platform (Linux related and otherwise) developments were happening inside Microsoft even During Ballmer (DB). As we have reported before on Forbes, Microsoft's Amanda Silver has explained how the firm had been working with open source JavaScript standards (as best it could) even in less open times. Microsoft's Liuson tells a similar and related set of story facts. Maybe the whole #womeninIT drive for diversity should have been a whole lot more prevalently promoted a very long time ago (clue: of course it should).

"We talk now about how Microsoft is ‘open by design’ now. In fact the very first product that Microsoft open sourced came from my team and this was WiX [a Windows setup and installation engine] and this happened back in 2004. We were probably immature in terms of how to open source at that stage, but we wanted to try something out with that product,” said Liuson.

Despite previous CEO Ballmer’s apparent reticence for all things Linux, the firm did actually initiate its first work with Linux (including the launch of the TypeScript open source project) during his tenure. Admittedly, this was primarily and initially with a view to ensuring compatibilities, the wider embrace of the community model came a little later.

Open source Word & Excel unlikely

“Microsoft is a big company, there were plenty of internal legal challenges that we had to go through and things tend to happen on a department by department basis. So if you are going to ask would the Office division ever open source Word and Excel? Probably not, that just wouldn’t make sense,” explained Liuson.

Liuson says she get the question all the time: when is Windows going to be open source? She says that she always laughs and says that, “You should ask Terry that question.” In which case she is referring to Terry Myserson in his role as Windows lead.

So what does open by design mean to Microsoft and what does the firm think about the ‘well known’ corporate open source projects?

Open Google is behind a corporate wall

“So what do I mean when I say ‘open by design’ you ask? If you think about Java, if you think about Chrome, if you think about Android… these are all supposed to be open source projects, but they tend to present huge chunks of code update [much in the same way that a proprietary project would]. You as a developer can submit bug fixes and various nuances, but the design process happens behind the corporate wall even though the final source code is out in the open. This is one definite approach that we decided NOT to do with .NET and Visual Studio Code as we moved to open source them. We want inclusive design meetings to be able to build the future of this technology stack with our developer community,” said Liuson.

How does Microsoft actually work with the outside world then? Code commits come in a comparatively standard project as they come in the form of a pull request on the open soucre GitHub code repository. But open source means a lot more than code i.e. there are designs, presentation layer user interface artistry and even international language localization tasks. In total then, open source contribution can be quite an unstructured total process.

Would open Microsoft have killed the start button?

“Well, that’s a tough question, from my own personal experience I can tell you that there were plenty of Microsoft employees that felt both ways about it. We knew that we needed to move towards presenting a more mobile platform compliant operating system and that’s one of the reasons why it happened,” said Liuson.

Looking at how Microsoft now delivers its products, not just for Windows, but for any platform, Liuson talks about the importance of services. She asserts that when a software firm ships a boxed product (as we were used to on DVDs and CD-ROMs and floppies in the past) there is a natural disconnect and you never really get to know your customer.

In the world of services (and cloud computing) you are constantly connected to your software customer and can start to provide continuous development/deployment, continuous updates and continuous integration.

Is Microsoft viewed as truly open source now?

“I would say, to answer that question, not yet," admitted Liuson. "But I would like people to view Microsoft as very open source friendly. But we are a business and we need to earn a salary somehow, so there will of course be a monetization strategy behind much of what we do."

Given that Liuson has been with the firm for 24 years, it has obviously been interesting to work through a quarter century of change. Looking at the year ahead, the firm has been open about the fact that it has to make some of its more recent open technology announcements 'actually work' in terms of developer tools. So here think about Visual Studio for Mac as a prime example of a product that is so new and so open (that's another story, it has some .NET in it, but that's open now too) that the firm's focus will turn to refining it and making it functional in front of the always-critical open developer community.

Looking high level then, do we buy it? Do we accept the really truly open Microsoft?

The critically negative answer is: Well, mostly, but then the firm still has deeply rooted monetization streams drawing us back to paid services across Azure and its other platforms and some would argue that Microsoft still has to learn some of the behavioural nuances exhibited in 100% pure Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) community circles.

The optimistically positive answer is: Yes, driven by CEO Satya Nadella and the firm's Scott Guthrie, Microsoft has turned the ship around in as big a move as in IBM under Lou Gerstner (a switch from devices to services) and as Intel did under Andy Grove (a switch from memory to microprocessors).

If you're looking for the truth, then it's probably somewhere in between the two above.

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