The Open Road

The Wall Street Journal has announced its 2008 Technology Innovation Awards. Among the heavyweights on the list - Salesforce, Applied Materials, GlaxoSmithKline, etc. - is open-source storage vendor, Cleversafe, a company that I've long followed and admired.

It's great to see Cleversafe getting its due credit, especially from a list of judges that includes the CTO of Agilent, EVP of Software at SAP, and more distinguished names.

Here's what caught the judges' eyes:

[Cleversafe's] Dispersed Storage software breaks files up into slices and then sends the slices over the Internet to multiple storage locations on a network. By themselves, the slices are unreadable to hackers or anyone else not authorized to read them, but the original file can be easily reassembled, even if not all the slices are available due to equipment failure or natural disaster. The software also promises to be less expensive than traditional storage methods, which rely on creating full, multiple copies to protect against loss.

Jane Royston, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and an Innovation Awards judge, says the software "could be an important part of Internet data storage systems."

What a great testament to Cleversafe's continued progress and product excellence.

Things have been quiet from MySQL over the past month or so, but today's Wall Street Journal has an awesome interview with Sun's Marten Mickos, perhaps the most quotable technology executive on the planet.

I really like how he talks through community (how to provide incentives, what to expect in terms of contributions), as well as competition. On the latter front, Marten talks through the value of leading through innovation:

MYSQL chief Marten Mickos isn't afraid his rivals in the database-software industry will ever overtake him. "Let them try," he says. "Our secret is in the way we operate our culture, and I'm convinced others cannot imitate that."...

Even if someone studied us in tiny detail, I don't think they could really match us. We've shown them our code, and nobody has been able to measure up against what we have....Even if I showed you my DNA, you wouldn't know how to become me.

Ah, Marten. I missed you! Head to the article for much more. What a great person to have in the open-source ecosystem.

The influential Walt Mossberg has entered into the browser fray and declared a winner: Mozilla's Firefox:

My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user.

If you are a regular reader of the Journal, you know that Mossberg can be pretty tough on products. He's an Apple fan but tends to give Microsoft its due, as well. His choice of Firefox is impressive because he also tends to focus on the average consumer, i.e., someone that isn't likely to go out and download software, but rather will take whatever is given to them.

So the big question is how will John and the Mozilla crew get Firefox into more consumers' hands so that they can benefit from the best browser available?

Yes, the open-source database market is still relatively small (roughly $200 million in 2007, according to Gartner). But when The Wall Street Journal starts paying attention (subscription required), it's clear that the opportunity is huge. The Journal doesn't get paid to be sentimental.

Regardless, as Arjen Lentz opines,

...(D)isruptive technology tends to not take over the incumbent's market, but find or develop a completely new market, and indeed take over in that space. The question then is, does the incumbent's market remain intact, or does it change/evolve naturally and perhaps shrink or even completely disappear over time. Generally, the market-dominant incumbent continues to survive in a niche (where they are obviously dominant, but no longer in the market overall). In short, the market changes and with it its rules and demands.

Leading this market transformation is Sun Microsystems. Open-source databases (PostgreSQL and, especially, MySQL) may get a significant boost from Sun's involvement:

The rising generation of programmers isn't being fed .Net and Windows. It's growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux. It is very telling how far from reality Microsoft is by its response:

Microsoft hasn't been a player in the Net start-up world, in part because of the cost of its server product. Mr. Hilf tells [the WSJ] that Microsoft is trying to fix that with new licensing schemes that make Windows Server more affordable for start-ups....

... Read more

Yesterday I opened my Wall Street Journal and was struck by the advertisement staring back at me from the front page. Roughly two years ago the Journal started inserting one ad per day on its front page, talking it up as a prime advertising vehicle:

"The Wall Street Journal will provide the most valuable opportunity anywhere in any medium for advertisers who want to reach a large, affluent and influential audience," [said] L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of The Journal and executive vice president of Dow Jones & Company.

So who is this "large, affluent, and influential audience"? Gamers, as the inclusion of the $75,000 to $100,000+ advertisement suggests:

I read this fascinating article on the way home from Linuxworld today, and think there must be some way to apply it to open source. OK, the strategy sounds sneaky and underhanded to me, so I'm not going to be implementing it anytime soon.

But surely there's a less nefarious way to do it? More importantly, I'm sure the technology world has much to learn from how retail operates, especially as much of our precious intellectual property becomes commodified.

What is the strategy?