A Company That’s At Its Best When Freaking Out

But the road was a long one. In 2006, when Hilf hired Sam Ramji to take over Microsoft’s open source efforts, the company’s relationship to free software was still uneasy. A year later, Brad Smith and Horacio Gutierrez would make those apparent threats to the Linux community in the pages of Fortune. And when Ramji was hired to run open source at Microsoft, as he acknowledged years later, he was a little skeptical of the role — and a little scared.

There were ups, and there were downs. But Ramji’s meeting with Gates meant that the big changes would eventually happen. Not long after the meeting, Microsoft purchased a company called Powerset, a semantic search startup that was among the first companies to run a web service atop Hadoop. After a short hiatus, Microsoft allowed Powerset’s engineers to continue contributing code to the open source project. And for a while, the service continued to run on Hadoop, a means of crunching data across a sea of servers. At some point, the project abandoned the technology and moved the service to Microsoft software, and at least one of the main open source contributors left the company. But Powerset was at least a step in the right direction.

The following year, Ramji and his team prototyped an Amazon-like cloud service using nothing but open source software such as Zend and OpenNebula and Eucalyptus and OpenScale and Hadoop. “We were like the beta squadron,” Ramji remembers. “We were the attack squadron that would come test everybody. We would say: ‘You think you’re ahead? Let us show you what can be done with open source and two weeks of time and some smart Linux guys.”

According to Ramji, the project caused “deep discomfort” among the Microsoft braintrust. The company was already building Azure — then code-named Red Dog — using proprietary technologies. But for Ramji, deep discomfort is a good thing. “Microsoft is at its best when it’s freaking out,” he says. “That’s just it’s mentality. It’s a crisis-oriented company.”