Microsoft and Open Source: In IBM Mode?
April 10, 2012
In the ongoing war between Microsoft and Google there are areas where Google clearly dominates. One of those areas is mapping. However, according to the recent Computer World article, “Microsoft’s Secret Weapon Against Google Maps — Open Source” we learn that Microsoft has come up with a plan to fight back.
According to the article, Microsoft has been lending support and a great deal of funding to the open source mapping project OpenStreetMap where, much like Wikipedia, volunteers provide the information to build the free service.
Many companies including Apple have already switched from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap in order to avoid paying high fees.
The article states:
“Behind the scenes, spurring all this on, is Microsoft. Microsoft hired OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast to work for Bing as Principal Architect for Bing Mobile. Coast works on both Bing and OpenStreetMap. In a blog post announcing Coast’s hiring back in November 2010, Microsoft said Coast will “develop better mapping experiences for our customers and partners, and lead efforts to engage with OpenStreetMap and other open source and open data projects.”
While open source, regardless of Microsoft’s potentially shady motives, is usually a good thing for consumers, who knew that commercial outfits would find a way to use open source against one another? Microsoft may be learning from the master of open source as marketing. IBM embraced Eclipse, then Lucene, and pushed its blue shadow into other niches of the open source world. The result? IBM gets a boost from open source and a way to redirect certain research costs from basic search to more high value wrappers like Watson. Is Microsoft just doing open source as marketing or for a more strategic IBM-like maneuver? Worth watching.
Jasmine Ashton, April 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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