Open-source hardware, start-ups, and land wars in Asia
Had Vizzini of "The Princess Bride" lived to relate a third "classic blunder" beyond land wars in Asia and competing with Sicilians, he might have urged start-ups to avoid hardware-dependent strategies. Hardware, after all, can be expensive to build and can't match software for ease (and cost) of distribution.
So, is hardware a bad idea for start-ups? Or are we just thinking about hardware in the wrong way?
Open me up, find software/services inside.
Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign suggests that the hardware business, long shunned by Silicon Valley VCs for its costs and complexities, may be getting easier due to ready-made manufacturing capacity in China, which is driving down the cost of building hardware.
Open-source hardware could drop the price of development even further, as Om Malik recently wrote. Give away the designs for your hardware and let would-be customers build it themselves.
This is a particularly appealing strategy for companies that depend upon hardware to drive what are essentially software businesses. Apple builds its own hardware because it wants to control the complete consumer experience, but it could also enable third parties to build hardware that is optimized to run iTunes, OS X, and other Apple software.
Yet hardware could prove the undoing of Apple in smartphones, just as it did in the personal computer industry, when the pioneer Mac gave way to the relentless, ubiquitous Windows.
Sure, Apple's iPhone is currently blowing the competition out of the water. Google Android, however, poses a serious threat, given its ability to embrace multiple hardware vendors with a common platform. Were Google to extend this strategy with open-source hardware, too, the strategy could prove even more disruptive to Apple's current dominance.
Android's momentum is a sobering reminder to Apple that community can trump control.
This same strategy applies to others, too. What about TiVo? Or Sling Media? These are all companies that have built and distribute their own hardware, but really what they're providing is software or services. The hardware is simply there to enable consumer access to software-driven data or entertainment businesses.
So why not open source the hardware and, hopefully, accelerate adoption by lowering the cost of manufacture and distribution?
This is exactly what we're seeing happen in software, as companies race to open source complements to their core businesses. Intel with Linux, Google with Android, IBM with Linux/Apache/more, etc.
Can it work for hardware, too? I think so. But we're still waiting on someone to prove it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Open source hardware is the new BIG thing!
If you need proof visit http://harkopen.com/projects and find out how Arduino, Bug Labs, Make, Adafruit are moving things forward and changing the game same way how Linux, Firefox, Apache and other open source software changed the game in software world.
The success stories are Apple and RIM, both of which maintain rigid control of an integrated platform.
Platform fragmentation in Android is just as bad as with commercial Unix in the 80s and early 90s, which led them to lose out in the marketplace against Windows and Linux. Another analogy would be how the incredible variety of window systems for Linux (e.g. KDE vs. Gnome) hinders rather than encourages Linux Desktop adoption.
Sometimes an enlightened dictator gets more done than a fractious community.
It's the specific design these builders as asked by these companies which do cause issues since they are not mass-produced, which is goes in a 2-way results: 1) cheaper as it follows the same blueprint thus no change in production... 2) quality, a subjective matters as, given having built in masses, in order to save further cost (for some reasons), cutting corners minimally can lead to better or poorer quality.
As recently some macbook pros had the 'click-of-death' on their harddisk, and Nvidia GPU overheating, outsourcing of hardware has been ongoing. However, given the low labour cost in places like China and Indonesia, where else could used as base to focus on production? If a place like Japan or even States where there's higher labour cost, and in some places, minimal wage, would there be even sufficient profits to be made after taking into staff salaries, especially for upper manaement and stakeholders? It could lead to a vicious cycle of
1) staff-reduction->lower production->lower profits
2) staff-maintain->higher production->more workload (more time needed->increase in wage)->lower profit.
3) machineries taking part of staff production->purchase cost for precision machines-> maintainence after a few years(wear-and-tear / parts replacement)-> recalibrating of machines to new production methods->output drops (bbefore picking up)->profits uncertainty.
then what happens when supplies outstrip demands? profit drops due to lower sale cost is likely to happen.
thus, open sourcing can be a good thing, but also has just as bad, especially when it comes to monetary greed and expectations from shareholders.
- by madaerodog October 30, 2009 7:45 AM PDT
- It seems that open source hardware for you means ... hardware that uses open source software .. that's a pity, you missed the entire point of open source hardware ...
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(6 Comments)