Rewriting history

When I was getting ready to go to work this morning I tuned in to CNBC World and saw George Bush deliver a speech ahead of his trip to the G8 meeting next week. In the speech he outlined the United States’ leadership role in the fight against global warming. Mine is not by any means a blog about political viewpoints, but as a marketer I am fascinated by the apparent impunity with which leaders can rewrite their own history.

Which is why I had to think about another leader, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who takes a refreshingly different approach.

In a recent blog posting he made a surprisingly frank assessment about Sun’s recent failing for a company CEO. “Sun was under pressure in the market. Although many users loved our core Solaris operating system, others thought it was built for high end computers, not grid systems. Our computer business had failed to keep pace with the rest of the industry - which meant our volume systems looked expensive. In combination, and with a poor track record of supporting Solaris off of Sun hardware, we gave customers one choice - leave Sun. Many did. Those were the dark days. Where did they go? They went to GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system built by a growing community, running on x86 systems.”

He then goes on to say how Sun moved on from there. How they were advised to litigate Linux providers, but how instead they chose to compete by innovation and not by litigation. Jonathan is claiming good progress as a result, and at Zend we can observe the increasing strength of Solaris through our customer interactions. Even without the field validation I would tend to trust his claims - the frankness of his assessments and the tradition he has built of open communications through his blog, are tremendously valuable to Sun customers and eventually to Sun itself.

Microsoft (see: “Microsoft takes on the free world“) should also pay attention to Jonathan. “All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach. That’s not a genie any litigator I know can put back in a bottle.”

Microsoft’s “Licensing, not Litigating” messaging does not add value to this debate over patents. The Novell deal shows that company only licenses because it wants to avoid litigation, so licensing can not be separated from litigation.

Microsoft is already proving it can do better. Zend has nothing but positive to report about its cooperation with Microsoft. It is not based on any explicit or implied threats and it has already produced measurable improvements for PHP - a win for the PHP community, for Zend and for Microsoft.