In this interview in the NYT, Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer makes two interesting statements which are great evidence for the supremacy of the collobarative and agile approach of the open source software production system:
The Big Bang/Waterfall Model failed
Windows Vista failed to redesign and integrate at the same time, because they chose the big bang, waterfall approach rather than the agile, continuous and collaborative integration so well known in the open source world. Though they had 5 years and about a year of delay with certainly one of the largest, smartest and best-paid software development teams in the world working on it - they failed! Specifically, he says:
"We said, let’s try to give them a new file system and a new
presentation system and a new user interface all at the same time. It’s
not like we had them and were just trying to integrate them. We were
trying to develop and integrate at the same time. And that was beyond
the state of the art."
But Linux has exactly achieved this in a timeframe similar to 5 years with much less developer resources. Therefore I think one should add, that Microsoft's Windows Vista project plan was simply "beyond
the state of the art of the closed source, waterfall approach"
Community Collaboration is Key to the Future
Microsoft staff and Ballmer are not stupid, they recognize that (many aspects of the) open source model have won. But how would he say this? Well, read this:
"I think one pervasive change is the increasing importance of community.
That will come in different forms, with different age groups of people
and it will change as the technology evolves. But the notion of
multiple people interacting on things — that will forever continue.
That’s different today, and we’re going to see those differences build.
You see it in a variety of ways now, in social networking sites, in the
way people collaborate at work, and in ad hoc collaboration over the
Internet."
Though he primarily speaks of the user experience here, I am sure he includes the Microsoft software production system in his thoughts, which would be nothing else than an adoption of the collaborative, open and agile approach of open source at Microsoft.
The Change at Microsoft Needs to be a Culture Change
It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft will have the power to implement those changes, which will be mostly culture changes, from closed to open, from a paranoid or even predatory competition to broad collaboration, from zero-sum economies (Mac or Windows) to win/win attitudes.
Every manager knows that these are the most difficult if not sometimes impossible changes. Culture is well entrenched in the heads of a company's employees and needs to be changed one by one. The "right" culture is often a source of competitive advantage (e.g., the 'fun' culture at Southwest airlines is a big part of their success, which the competitors desperatly try to mimick for many years), but if markets change,e.g. like the change from closed to open, past cultural advantages (e.g. the "only the paranoid survives" culture at Microsoft and Intel) can turn into "sustained competitive disadvantages".