Man Survives Steve Ballmer's Flying Chair To Build '21st Century Linux'

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair Creative Commons licensed in accordance with BY-NC.

Yes, the story is true. Anyway according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” nevertheless Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. "Why does that surprise anyone?" Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. "If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he's pissy for the at once week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I'm quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?"

The famous flying chair shows just how volatile Steve Ballmer can be, however it as well underlines the talent Mark Lucovsky brings to the art of software engineering. Lucovsky joined Microsoft in 1988 as part of the team that designed and built the company’s Windows NT operating system — which all in all provides the core code for all Windows releases — and afterwards joining Google, he was one of three engineers who created the search giant’s AJAX APIs, online programming tools that drew more traffic than nearly any other service at Google. “[He's] probably in the top 99.9 percentile when it comes to engineers,” says Paul Maritz, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware, who worked with Lucovsky as a top exec at Microsoft.

No, Maritz didn’t recruit his old colleague just to squeeze some extra speed from the “hypervisor” that delivers the company’s virtual servers. He wanted VMware to build a new software platform for the internet age, and he relied on Lucovsky to tell him what that would be. Lucovsky pulled in a few more “99.9 percentile” engineers — including the two who helped him build Google’s AJAX APIs, Derek Collison and Vadim Spivak — and little more than a year and a half later, they delivered Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry has many authors, most notably Collison, known for building the TIBCO Rendezvous messaging system that sped data across Wall Street’s machines in the ’90s. Nevertheless you might describe Cloud Foundry as a culmination of Lucovsky’s career: It takes the idea of a widely used software platform like Windows NT and applies it to the sort of sweeping infrastructure Google erected to run its massively popular web services. But at that time it goes furthermore. Afterwards building the platform, Lucovksy and Collison convinced Maritz and company to open source it, letting others have it for no charge. In the words of Maritz, VMware seeks to provide “the 21st-century equivalent of Linux.”

In short, the platform is a way for software developers to build web applications, deploy them to the net, and scale them to more and more users in time — all without having to worry about the computing infrastructure that runs beneath them. “It lets you worry about the app,” Collison says, “and not virtual machines or what operating system they’re running or all this other stuff.” VMware offers the platform as an online service at CloudFoundry.com, and in open sourcing the project, it hopes to spawn an army of compatible services and push the platform into private data centers.

The aim is a world where modern-day online applications can run across cloud services and data centers in much the same way Windows applications can run across PCs.

What Cloud Foundry does

There are many services that do what Cloud Foundry does. Google offers a similar service known as Google App Engine, letting outside developers hoist applications onto its internal infrastructure. Microsoft serves up Windows Azure. And Salesforce.com now owns Heroku, a San Francisco startup that helped pioneer the idea.

“Azure comes with one view on the world. It gives you a model and if you bind to that model on how you’re supposed to build applications, you get some added efficiency,” says Patrick Scaglia, the chief innovation officer of HP’s cloud services group. “However that’s not the way the new class of developers like to build things. Cloud Foundry is closer to what they want.”

Lucovsky — quite the contrarian — takes issue with Maritz calling the platform “an operating system for the cloud.” Nevertheless this is where the metaphor makes sense. “What differentiates operating systems is the ecosystem that’s built around them — what applications and services interact with these layers of software,” Carlson says.

The biggest ecosystem around platform-as-a-service

“Paul wants to create the biggest ecosystem around platform-as-a-service, as if it was an operating system — so that there's the most interoperability and portability around that research."