Tom Hanrahan, Novell, Linspire, Xandros & Interoperability

So for those of you who read Port 25, this is old news. However I just wanted to echo Sam Ramji's welcome for Tom Hanrahan as our new Director of Linux Interoperability. Clearly Tom will have lots to do with our continuing work with Novell as well as our recent announcements for collaboration and interop with Linspire and Xandros. As a side note, I just read Linspire CEO, Kevin Carmony's, letter regarding the community reaction to the Microsoft – Linspire deal and I was extremely impressed. Carmony, in my opinion, takes a realistic and pragmatic view around open source and commercial software working together highlighting the need to enable customer choice, regardless of whether that choice comes from the commercial software or open source software world. The reality is that both are out there, and both will continue to be out there for the foreseeable future. IT departments around the world need to manage diverse heterogeneous systems. So the better those systems interoperate, the more utility (and lower cost) the overall collection of systems has for its administrators and users. Right on, Kevin.

One thing from Tom's welcome that really hit home for me was the depth of experience he has "developing in the open" as Sam said. Having just finished my first milestone on the OpenLDAP adapter (see my posts tagged OpenLDAP) I'm still adjusting to the differences of running a project in front of the firewall but I look forward to learning more from the folks over at Port 25. It's funny when I think back a few years at how far we've come here at Microsoft in terms of transparency with our customers and willingness to engage the community early and often in the development process.

5 or 6 years ago we were arguing about blogs… was it OK for employees to blog about what they were working on? Turns out customers loved it! I remember only 3 or 4 years ago we were arguing on my team about a project codenamed "ladybug" and whether or not we should participate. Fortunately for us, and for our customers, cooler heads prevailed on those discussions and "ladybug" lived on. The "ladybug" project has morphed and evolved over the last few years to become Microsoft Connect. This is a fantastic tool that gives customers web access to our bug tracking system to submit and track issues and suggestions they've got through using our products. When I was back on the XML team we got tons of great feedback during the Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Beta/CTP cycles through ladybug and fixed a bunch of bugs we might not have found on our own. After Connect, we invented Channel 9 (and its offspring), started Codeplex, and began rewarding engineers for customer engagements online in the forums as well as in person, user groups, and at conferences.

All of these things are little steps, but I think it's important to look at the evolution of the culture and mindset to get some indication of where it's going. Creating Port 25, hiring Tom, building up the IVA (more on the IVA in a future post), creating the Interoperability Executive Council and our commitment to interoperability by design are part of the new generation of initiatives in a shift that started many years ago towards transparency, customer connection, and customer choice. I'm really looking forward to what's coming up – stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,

Adam