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In a month of unexpected outcomes, we have also seen some tech partnership announcements, ones we thought we might never see. In fact, just this week we witnessed Microsoft joining the Linux foundation<\/a> and Google joining\u00a0Microsoft\u2019s .NET foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n You cannot minimize just how at odds these announcements are with what has been the reality of the tech industry over the last 20 years. These are organizations that have battled one\u00a0other in a bitter war of words and technology visions. The idea that they would someday be working together was a highly unlikely outcome.<\/p>\n And yet it happened surprisingly fast, as the changing nature of the industry has forced companies who once diametrically opposed one another to start working together for the sake\u00a0of their customers.<\/p>\n Back in the day when companies lived inside their proprietary stacks, they could afford to make it difficult to work together. Those days are gone, and in the age of the cloud, customers are demanding interoperability \u2014 and the big platform companies are duty-bound to give it to them.<\/p>\n Photo: Marc Benioff<\/a><\/p>\n We saw a similarly curious partnership play out last year at Dreamforce<\/a> when Satya Nadella appeared on stage at Salesforce\u2019s massive customer conference. You have to have followed the industry for the last decade to truly understand how implausible this would have been just a few years ago. These were two companies at each other\u2019s throats suing <\/a>and counter-suing<\/a> one another.<\/p>\n There seemed little likelihood\u00a0that the company CEOs \u2014 Salesforce\u2019s Marc Benioff and Nadella \u2014 would ever appear on stage together, but here they were smiling and shaking hands and appearing for all intents and purposes to be best buddies. Benioff talked about how incredible Microsoft was as a company and what a great leader Nadella was.<\/p>\n Nadella said something that has stuck with me to this day, and is worth repeating: \u201cIt is incumbent upon us, especially those of us who are platform vendors to partner broadly to solve real pain points our customers have.\u201d<\/p>\n He clearly understood that to survive and thrive in today\u2019s marketplace, Microsoft has to work with companies it once considered enemies. Yet Nadella said something else that day that could explain the incongruence we are seeing in the tech industry as players partner one day and compete the next.<\/p>\n As I wrote last year in Cooperation is the new normal at Microsoft<\/a>:<\/p>\n [Nadella] added that he doesn\u2019t see this as a zero sum competitive game. Of course Microsoft will compete hard within markets, but he sees such a huge opportunity around digital transformation, and these partnerships can only help amplify that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Perhaps that explains how gleefully Microsoft announced\u00a0it had landed HP as a CRM customer<\/a> last September \u2014 snatching\u00a0it away from frenemy\u00a0Salesforce. Microsoft\u2019s VP of cloud and enterprise, Scott Guthrie was positively gushing about it, as quoted in a story on GeekWire<\/a>:<\/p>\n HP Inc. \u201cis a very large Salesforce shop \u2014 or they were until yesterday,\u201d Guthrie said. \u201cIt was a Salesforce takeout. HP Inc. is planning a massive migration and a big bet on Dynamics. It\u2019s one of the more public (wins) we\u2019ve had.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That brings us to this week\u2019s announcements where Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, an organization it has fought with for years. Microsoft spent the 90s and early 2000s dismissing Linux and open source in general. This week, it forked over $500,000 to become a Platinum member of the organization.<\/p>\n The move toward Linux actually shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise when you consider that Microsoft reports that one-third of Azure virtual machines are running Linux. If that\u2019s where the customers going, Microsoft had little choice but to follow.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, we have Google and Microsoft, two companies who are competing hard with\u00a0with one another in the cloud, joining forces around .NET. Both companies are chasing rival AWS, so perhaps it\u2019s a case of \u2018the enemy of my enemy is my friend.\u2019 Of course, trying to tell who\u2019s an enemy and who\u2019s a friend has gotten appreciably more difficult.<\/p>\n Ultimately, we have gotten to this point for a couple of reasons. First of all technology has become so complex, it\u2019s become increasingly difficult for any one organization to provide the entire solution (or at least do all of it\u00a0well). The other factor, which may be most important of all, is that customers want choice. They don\u2019t want to be beholden to any single vendor, and they are demanding interoperability.<\/p>\n Yet it would be a mistake to think this is just something Microsoft is doing. It\u2019s a story that\u2019s being played out all over the tech industry as companies that once competed fiercely with one another look for ways to work together, even as they struggle to find that competitive edge to beat their partners. Strange days, indeed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nChanging business models<\/h2>\n
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Sleeping with the enemy<\/h2>\n