Friday Five — December 9, 2016

Microsoft has decided that the operating system is no longer an important battleground, and that it's more important to gain market share in cloud (Azure and Office 365) than it is to put energy into battling Linux for application market share. An operating system only matters because it is a platform for applications. Apps make money for businesses and productivity for individuals–i.e. they deliver the real value of computing. So if you're Satya Nadella [CEO of Microsoft] and in charge of Azure and Windows, what is the single best strategy for growth? Do you keep pouring money into making Windows the platform for more apps vs. Linux? Or should you just not care which operating system (OS) the app runs on, throw open the doors, and welcome every single app that runs on Linux onto Azure? Although it is doubtless painful, as Satya you stop caring about the OS and focus on the cloud app platform, embarking on a program to make yourself as attractive as possible for every Linux app.

Kaylyn McGuyrt lost her arm in an ATV accident. She now has a clinical-grade prosthetic arm, but many aspects of her job as a cake decorator are difficult. Thanks to a new collaboration between Red Hat and Duke University, Duke students are designing a new prosthetic that will help the 26-year-old in her work and other daily tasks. The collaboration also brings new open source principles and methodologies to Duke's campus. A $180,000 gift from Red Hat will help support courses, grants and internships through the Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation program at the university. The Red Hat gift will assist students who have project ideas that use open-source software to advance humanitarian issues. For instance, a group of student volunteers at Duke called eNABLE, who make prosthetics using 3D printers, recently received a $2,000 grant to help people like McGuyrt. Red Hat also recently produced an award-winning documentary, "eNABLE: Open Technology, Faster Progress," for its Open Source Stories film series.

The full Red Hat JBoss Middleware stack is now containerized and available on Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud. Diógenes Rettori, Red Hat's OpenShift principal product manager, explained, "Somewhere along the way, Linux containers, Kubernetes, and Docker happened. [This] made us realize that containerization of applications is the base for your next 20 years." As far and fast as cloud computing is embedding itself into the enterprise, there remain many cloud-resistant applications and services. Rettori continued, "A platform is only as important as the applications you run on top of it. With that in mind, we made an important decision and investment to evolve our application portfolio in similar ways that we ask our customers to do to theirs: let's take our Red Hat JBoss Middleware products, commonly deployed on Linux and Windows machines, and make them available as containerized deployments."

The number of corporate apologies has increased dramatically over the past decade. And for good reason: Failing to admit a mistake is one of the fastest ways a CEO can put themselves and their company's reputation at risk. I'm not alone on this–81 percent of Americans say a public apology from a CEO would be seen as a positive step during a crisis. And yet, too many leaders still struggle to publicly acknowledge when they stumble. A 2013 study by Forum Corporation found that of the nearly 1,000 global leaders and employees surveyed, only 19% of employees said their bosses were willing to apologize for mistakes. An important part of a leader's job is to build trust and loyalty among employees by communicating openly and taking ownership of mistakes. When leaders can't be transparent about their own shortcomings, they risk negatively impacting corporate productivity, bottom lines, and the next generation of talent. As a leader, you want to avoid mistakes whenever possible. But part of your job is taking responsibility when you do inevitably mess up.

Red Hat's starter option for containerization platforms is OpenShift Dedicated–a public cloud-based, mostly preconfigured solution, which launched at this time last year on Amazon AWS. This week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Google Cloud Platform as an alternative option for deploying OpenShift Dedicated. "The difference we have with OpenShift now running on AWS and Google," said Sathish Balakrishnan, who directs OpenShift Online for Red Hat, "is we are giving customers a choice." OpenShift Dedicated, unlike other options in the product line, is bundled with IT management of assets by Red Hat, over and above the oversight of the cloud provider. Balakrishnan explained that OpenShift Dedicated narrows that list of platforms to the ones customers tend to choose most, "knowing full well that customers have made inherent choices of which cloud provider they want," he explained. Red Hat can then focus its attention on managing workloads within that narrower list. Put another way, OpenShift Dedicated for Google Cloud Platform enables a choice that has already been made.