Microsoft Is Irrelevant | David Heinemeier Hansson | Big Think

Microsoft Is Irrelevant

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David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and the creator of the Ruby on Rails open source web development framework. He is also a partner with Jason Fried at the web-based software development firm 37signals. In 2005 he was given with the Hacker of the Year by Google and O'Reilly award for his creation of Ruby on Rails. He and Fried have also co-authored the New York Times bestseller "Rework," which reveals their secrets for boosting business productivity in the Internet age.

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DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON:

"They have no bearing on what I do," says Hansson of the software giant. But he admits there is something sad about no longer having an "evil empire" to rally against.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is Microsoft doing to compete with popular open source frameworks like Rails?

David Hansson: So I think the economic motive for Microsoft for doing all this is very clear. They want to sell Windows and they want to sell SQL Server and they want to sell that entire stack of stuff. And that entire stack of stuff doesn't have a very good track record of working well with the other side of things, the open source side of things. So if that's not true, then you pretty much have to do everything yourself. I find that most Microsoft shops are exactly that, they're Microsoft shops. They use Microsoft from top to bottom, everything is Microsoft. It's Microsoft version control, it's Microsoft database server, it's Microsoft web servers, it's Microsoft development languages, it's Microsoft everything. And they get some benefits of sort of the virtual integration from that, but it also makes the community very insular, in my mind. I've met a fair number of Microsoft people who just know a lot about Microsoft stuff. And I mean, that's fair. It's just not the same kind of people that we really associate otherwise.

Versus on the open source side of things, like I talk to plenty of people who work in Python or other languages or frameworks, there's much more, I think, sharing of ideas between the different camps on, that are the line. Like, it's sort of pretty much open source or not open source. If you're in the open source world, you talk to other open source developers and look at other open source solutions. If you're on the sort of proprietary closed, whatever you want to call it, Microsoft-side of things, you just stay in your own camp.

So it makes perfect business sense to me for them to devote all this time to it. I don't know if it makes business sense for a lot of shops to choose that. Most of the time, it doesn't seem to pan out, like I would never want to start my business using stuff that would add up to heavy, heavy license fees. Once you get into the open source mentality and mindset, there's just something almost offensive about that. Just saying, like, "I don't want to be locked in to somebody else's platform that I can't actually change." It comes down to sort of a fundamental sense of freedom. Do I have the freedom to change and switch out and substitute the tools that I'm using with? Or am I bound to some master? And I picked what I find to be freedom in that sort of dichotomy, even if it's a little contrived.

Question: Will Microsoft continue to be dominant in 10 years?

David Hansson: I think that Microsoft is still a huge and profitable company and will be for a very long time. I think that they're dying by 1,000 cuts, but those 1,000 cuts might take 1,000 years to inflict a mortal wound. What I enjoy most, though, is unlike the '90s, where you had to care, and almost fear, Microsoft, that they were the big bully and they could control everything, today, for me, they're irrelevant. I don't care. They have no bearing on what I do. I don't have to use any Microsoft technology, I don't have to use Windows for this or any of their tools for that, and in fact, I don't, and haven't for a very long time. I sort of still have to care about Internet Explorer and making the web apps I create work on their stuff, but even that is becoming less of a concern. Gone are the days of Internet Explorer having 95% market share, long, long gone. Now, it's just sort of a nuisance. "Oh, crap, we have to deal with IE6, oh, all right." But, there's a big difference between fearing the 800-pound gorilla and then just waving at flies. Oh, these are annoying flies, get out of my face...

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