Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.
It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.
Just give me my !%!%! apps, already!
Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.
Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don't have the luxury of waiting.
It's not enough for cloud vendors to build the infrastructure and pray, "Field of Dreams" style, that customers will come. They won't. Not without applications and a host of other issues worked out for them, not by them.
Even Google, born in the cloud, recognizes this. Instead of forcing government customers into its public cloud, the company is building a dedicated cloud for government organizations in the U.S. Google's reasoning?
We also want to do our part to make it easier for government to transition to cloud computing. We recognize that government agencies have unique regulatory and compliance requirements for IT systems, and cloud computing is no exception. So we've invested a lot of time in understanding government's needs and how they relate to cloud computing. To help meet those requirements we're taking two important steps....
One step is certification, and the other is dedicated hosting. As much as Google may hope that its other prospective Google Apps customers won't have "unique...requirements," they do (or think they do). it's a losing battle to tell them otherwise, at least in the short term. If an enterprise giant like GE demands a private cloud, GE is going to get it.
This same pragmatism will drive Google and other cloud-infrastructure providers to build out their application suites. Why? Because enterprises that move to the cloud expect to see applications follow them there. Today, however, most enterprise applications don't work well in the cloud, leaving would-be enterprises buyers all dressed up with nowhere to go, in terms of the ability to run desired applications.
Vendors are jockeying to satisfy this demand for cloud-based applications. Google is already well on its way with Gmail and the rest of its Apps, and has been in the market lately for more, but others like Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and IBM will be jumping into the M&A market to round out their offerings in order to deliver increasingly full application suites.
Microsoft has been actively courting developers to build cloud-ready applications for its Azure platform, while VMware bought into the Spring developer community for the same purpose. But in the winner-takes-most cloud platform war, the best short-term strategy is to provide applications, and not simply hope they get built.
Perhaps this is one reason IBM CEO Sam Palmisano claims to be undisturbed by Google's rise. IBM already has Lotus and more running in the cloud, and has a strong hold on enterprise wallets.
Some, like Red Hat or Amazon, may elect to sit it out and stick to their infrastructure-only guns, but such vows of paucity won't help potential service provider customers, and threaten to position them out of the longer-term battle for enterprise customers. Amazon can afford to refrain from seeking enterprise customers; Red Hat can't.
Microsoft is arguably best positioned in such a battle, at least from a portfolio perspective. After all, it has the applications--e.g., Exchange/Outlook, SharePoint, Office--that enterprises already use. What it doesn't have, at least, not yet, is experience running these applications in significant cloud deployments. But that will come.
Until it does, expect the big cloud-infrastructure vendors to buy competitive application offerings so as to distinguish their platforms to hosting and service providers. Sure, they can sell hosted Exchange, but that's a recipe for entrenching Microsoft in the cloud, just as happened on the "desktop" and server. Cisco et al. don't have much appetite for reliving Microsoft's glory.
Who are the likely targets? Zoho just became belle of the ball, of course, but there are others. I'd expect any application with either a significant following, like Acquia's Drupal, or significant cloud/hosting experience, like SugarCRM (Disclosure: I am an adviser to SugarCRM), to be up for grabs.
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Together we can figure this out
Despite Apple's tremendous success with the iPhone, we're still in the early innings of mobile adoption. As such, a strategy of "throwing-lots-of-things-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks" makes a lot of sense.
It's true of platforms like Google Android, but it's also true of applications.
Even on the iPhone, which reportedly drives $2.4 billion worth of applications in annual sales, very few application developers appear to be making much money. Zynga, creator of Farmville, is an exception, as BusinessWeek notes, doing more than $100 million in annual sales.
This isn't to suggest that developers should stop trying. Quite the opposite. Now is the time to try a range of applications to see what sells.
Google is following the same strategy with its Android platform. The company is happily promiscuous with its code, allowing and even encouraging fragmentation to see where the industry will take Android. Fragmentation enables handset manufacturers and others to find the best fit for Android in the market, rather than going the Apple route. ("If we build it, they will come.")
It's very possible, as Bill Weinberg notes, that such fragmentation and experimentation will result in Android getting greater play beyond mobile than it does in the smartphone market.
I suspect Google won't mind. As in other areas, it's using the broad-based, open-source approach to increase adoption of its services like Search, services which generate more than $22 billion each year.
It's an approach that works particularly well for a fast-follower: someone tracking the progress of an early market leader. An open-source strategy basically enables the industry to determine, by itself and for itself, what the market leader is missing and how to resolve the voids.
However, it's also a good way to generate developer interest and, hence, modifications and add-ons. Application developers might be well-served by open-sourcing their applications to encourage adoption and make their road maps a community affair.
There are over 4 billion mobile phones on the planet, with virtually no one outside of the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers making money from this extensive device reach. The market is ripe for software businesses, but first we need to experiment to discover what sells. Open source just might be able to help with that.
In the battle for supremacy among the software industry's Big Four, Cisco may be placing the biggest bets and angling for the biggest returns. Some still think of Cisco as a networking hardware vendor, but hardware is simply Cisco's beachhead into others' turf, similar to how Microsoft (desktop), Oracle (database), and IBM (everything) are using core strengths to move into adjacent markets.
If anyone needed further confirmation of Cisco's software aspirations, its forays into Linux offer a strong hint.
In what might have looked like a publicity stunt around a $100,000 prize for Linux developers, Cisco's Linux development contest was actually a major clue as to just how serious it is about becoming a leading server vendor with a global development community--and soon.
Today, Cisco announced the winners of its "Think Inside the Box" contest. The three winning applications are very interesting, but the bigger story here is what Cisco's contest just demonstrated:
Most of Cisco's 7 million installed Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) are now servers, for all intents and purposes.
The contest proved that server-side Linux developers who know C/C++, Java, or Python can now write applications to Cisco routers with little or no knowledge of routers. (Remember: the finalists only had 90 days to write their applications).
That's a development community of millions, folks. Overnight.
Still think Cisco is a hardware company? By fostering a developer ecosystem around its core router family of products, Cisco just made its hardware solutions much more valuable to its customers (and increased the stickiness of its customer relationships), and turned its routers into a big target development platform for developers.
I wrote about Cisco's contest last June as Cisco's way of paying developers to stick a finger in the Microsoft eye with a $100,000 bounty for writing Linux-based applications for its AXP (Application Extension Platform).
I clearly underestimated Cisco's ambitions.
This is doubly clear when correlated with another Cisco announcement this week about its new and expanded Cisco Developer Network, which SearchNetworking covered.
Cisco is serious about software and fostering a global developer community. As I argued in my "Software's Big Four" blog, each of these companies is entering new markets from incumbent positions of strength, unlike HP and SAP (which both have big software businesses), which are largely sticking to existing businesses.
Millions of Cisco routers already sit in data centers and branch offices around the world. They consume less power than servers. They have a smaller footprint. They're more secure. And they enable a class of applications that Cisco calls "network-aware." Just slot in an AXP blade hosting an application.
Basically routers are much smarter now, and with the right applications can be used to take control of your phones at night to monitor for burglars; manage HVAC, water, and power in your office; deliver advertising in your retail store; and much, much more.
There are two things Cisco still lacks, however, in order to make an unimpeachable bid for developers. First, it needs to move off Broadcom chips for its ISRs and add x86 chips to the mix, something that I'm hearing rumblings may well be on the way.
Second, as impressive as Cisco's outreach to Linux developers has been, the company also needs to support Microsoft's .Net/Windows developers. It's too big a market to ignore.
If Cisco can deliver on x86 and to Microsoft developers--and I think it just might--Cisco will have opened its router (server) family to an even larger development community than the already large Linux market, further blurring the distinction between routers and general-purpose servers.
The result? A formidable software company that sprouted out of a dominant hardware company. How would Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM react?
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For years, Red Hat has happily sold Linux to Unix shops anxious to save money at equivalent or better performance. During this time, the company largely avoided Microsoft, which has tended to compete much higher up the stack. No longer. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that one of Microsoft's biggest opportunities lies in enterprise infrastructure and associated application development.
Red Hat, meet Redmond.
Red Hat wants to own the infrastructure market. The company is nearing its initial $1 billion goal, but has a far more audacious ambition: own half the associated middleware market.
This is a direct challenge to Microsoft, especially the manner in which Red Hat aims to go about it. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst noted in the company's earnings call earlier this year, Red Hat is "laser-like focused on that mission of commoditizing these key (infrastructure) layers" through open source.
It's not a strategy that will endear the open-source agitator to Microsoft.
After all, Microsoft is also focused on these opportunities, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told TechCrunch:
Biggest opportunity that we never talked about is enterprise infrastructure. Most of that goes to the database and mainframe vendors today who are in the business. We've got four billion in revenue and yet we're a small market share player.
Servers, there are going to be more new applications written in the next five years than any five-year period of time.
The two companies can't help but run into each other. Will they also be able to collaborate? They must. No customer is going to exclusively run either Microsoft or Red Hat technologies. The two have showed an ability to get along, if only a little bit. Can the two come together even as they seek to beat each other to bloody pulps?
Time will tell. But the market is about to get very interesting again. To achieve its goals, Red Hat must increase its investment in JBoss to make it an even better application platform that can effectively compete with Microsoft and its comprehensive infrastructure/middleware/tools suite.
As it does so, it's going to bump into Microsoft SharePoint, which is increasingly used as a platform for building applications, much like Red Hat's JBoss application server. SharePoint has come under threat from Google recently, but this is a battle Red Hat will have to fight, too.
As for Microsoft, I can't see how it can hope to compete with Red Hat's open-source strategy without including a healthy dose of open source, itself. Figuring out how to maintain its profit margins and sales potential, while simultaneously encouraging the growth of its developer ecosystem, is going to be difficult without open source.
It's a battle for the heart and soul of the enterprise, and it's going to get a little messy. It's about time.
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One of the hardest parts about launching a new product is knowing what prospective customers want to buy. Sure, some companies like Apple can impose their product visions on the public, but most vendors need to fulfill pre-existing product requirements, not create new ones. For everyone but Apple open source offers a great way to perform product management.
This is the sort of product marketing/management that most software vendors do. Focus groups, interviews, surveys, etc., form the basis of the product requirements documents (PRDs), which are then used to build products.
Open source may provide a better, more efficient way. As Stephen Walli puts it:
Open source software is a key economic driver from an engineering efficiency and software reuse perspective, but it also opens new opportunities and additional tools for product management to engage better with customers and improve both the top line and the bottom line.
By providing free access to one's product, coupled with the ability to modify it to suit one's needs, open source enables users to describe exactly what they'd buy from the original developer of the open-source project.
My employer, Alfresco, provides an example. The company was founded to provide an open-source alternative to incumbent vendors in the enterprise content management (ECM), Web content management (WCM), and records management (RM) markets. For years, our marketing has targeted buyers in these markets, pitching a low-cost, high-value alternative to proprietary ECM/WCM/RM.
Our customers didn't get the memo. While we were talking about ECM, many of the roughly 30,000 people downloading the product every month were using it as a foundation upon which to build their own applications, most of which would never be classified as ECM. They were creating their own category of infrastructure/middleware, using our technology.
The content application server was born, and we almost missed it, despite the fact that it was happening with our code. We were so busy marketing our vision that we almost missed listening to our users' vision(s). This new vision on an old way of using our product will significantly impact everything we do for years to come.
This is a major opportunity for open-source vendors. As Vinnie Mirchandani (@dealarchitect) suggests, "strategic apps are being custom built" by enterprise IT, not IT vendors. Increasingly, as Stan Rose, managing director, technology risk management, Bank of New York Mellon, told me a few years back, open source is the innovation platform upon which such strategic applications are built.
This is great news, because it means open-source companies, if they listen to their users, are well-positioned to build platforms that can become the lifeblood of enterprise IT. ReadWriteWeb rightly concludes that Twitter's "success has been credited to its ability to transform from a basic life streaming service into a platform," with an outsized, $1 billion valuation to match.
Few open-source companies wouldn't salivate to have the same valuation.
Redmonk's James Governor defines this platform opportunity in the context of "tools," but I think we're talking about the same thing. Open-source companies and communities have the potential to deliver an exceptional platform experience, one built on "tools" in Governor's sense of the word, provided they listen to their users to know what sort of "tools" to build.
There are billions to be made. It's just a matter of listening.
Red Hat has announced its 2009 Innovation Awards, with some impressive finalists making the list. From Whole Foods to Harvard Business School Publishing, major organizations are doing impressive things with Red Hat technology. Interestingly, however, the real "innovation" revealed by these awards is just how much more money Red Hat makes in its JBoss deals than in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deals.
I reported earlier this year that Red Hat's JBoss business is growing at twice the rate of its RHEL business. This isn't surprising: JBoss is still relatively small change compared to RHEL, growing from a smaller base.
But that's not the whole story. JBoss drives $10 in services revenue for every $1 in subscription revenue, which makes JBoss much more interesting to Red Hat's channel partners than RHEL. JBoss and the solutions that run on it are also much more interesting to CIOs, who tactically choose RHEL to save money but strategically choose JBoss to help make money.
RHEL is effectively just a commodity business, which means the best way to juice the business is to grow the volume of transactions through the channel, because it's difficult to grow the size of those transactions.
RHEL is all about "selling boxes" (i.e., servers), in other words. It's tactical, not deeply strategic.
If you look at Red Hat's Innovation Awards finalists, the RHEL innovation leaders are those that are saving money on the operating system but still spending plenty on applications like SAP, because applications drive their business value. At Whole Foods Markets, for example, "innovation" means "use of Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems that resulted in reduced costs, reallocated resources and the ability of the Whole Foods IT department to focus on strategic business initiatives."
Moving to RHEL, in short, was tactical: it allowed Whole Foods to innovate ("focus on strategic business initiatives") elsewhere. RHEL wasn't the innovation. It enabled the innovation.
JBoss is different. JBoss enables the Red Hat sales team to focus on the strategic initiatives within enterprises, because JBoss gets Red Hat closer to the applications that power these companies. An operating system lays the foundation for innovation. An application server and, critically, the applications that run on it, serves up the innovation itself, and makes Red Hat much more interesting to CIOs.
Red Hat has a decision to make moving forward. It can move up the software stack and sell JBoss-based solutions that get it a seat at the CIO's table with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and others. Or it can continue its tactical push by focusing on increased volume of RHEL-based servers into the market.
There is plenty of value (and money) in either the tactical (RHEL) or strategic (JBoss) approach, but Red Hat becomes a truly disruptive, game-changing company through enhanced focus on middleware and applications. As a (mostly) Linux vendor, Red Hat can make plenty of money but will never make waves.
Today, Red Hat is a big (but little) company. Big in its sales as it approaches $1 billion in revenues. But little in its ambition to disrupt the industry through open source by giving CIOs a true choice in the area that matters most to their businesses: applications.
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Some argue that open-source software can't innovate. In fact, one of the industry's former executives, Peter Yared, recently argued that "the only successful open-source companies sell commodities."
Yared clearly hasn't heard of SpringSource, an open-source application platform provider that is redefining the J2EE application server and, quite possibly, the future of open source.
Yared isn't alone in his beliefs. A friend recently wrote me to suggest that open source is at its best when disrupting big, profitable markets:
Commercial open source is a (commodity) replacement market. When it is not (i.e., people are building new, never-done-before cool/future-proof apps with open-source technology), then it is a pure-play Internet-based business model, one that is becoming so specific/demanding that people will want full control and (to) develop their own stuff, e.g., Google, Facebook, and others that heavily use open source to build their Web services.
SpringSource and its ubiquitous Spring Framework, however, promise something different. Something much more ambitious. Not only does Spring challenge the status quo in application development, deployment, and management (Hyperic), but SpringSource is proving that commercial open source can peacefully coexist with community involvement.
In a conversation with Spring creator and SpringSource founder Rod Johnson, he clarified SpringSource's competitive differentiation:
The essence of SpringSource is that we're not a commodity play but have a far more ambitious agenda. We're not interested in replicating what closed-source vendors already offer, at lower price: We are providing a superior experience to developers and operations teams--for example, in our integrated approach to unifying the application life cycle from developer desktop to the data center--which doesn't presently exist in Java.
Of course, our offerings are also leaner (more productive and faster), cheaper and more open than those of the old incumbents, and that's a huge selling point in today's market. But we're focused on being the enterprise Java leader--and not merely in open source.
SpringSource's mantra: Managing the full Java life cycle.
(Credit: SpringSource)SpringSource isn't simply replacing IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, or Red Hat JBoss application servers. It is actually doing much more, and it offers, in my opinion, the best example of just how disruptive an open-source vendor can be precisely because SpringSource isn't seeking to be the open-source leader in Java, but the leader, period.
Gartner estimates that there are currently at least 2 million Spring developers, an impressive number suggesting that the Java community is looking to Spring to help it migrate Java applications onto lighter-weight containers (Tc Server), across highly virtualized environments, and ultimately to the cloud. Given SpringSource's strong financial performance, the company seems to be doing a good job of monetizing a significant percentage of that Spring adoption.
After meeting with the SpringSource executive team at its San Mateo, Calif., offices a few weeks ago to discuss its strategy, I'm convinced that the company is on track to improve that percentage significantly too.
We're at the point when it's not enough to be "the Red Hat of (CRM, ECM, ERP, etc.)." In a bad economy that sees open-source solutions adopted at an ever-increasing pace, now growing at a 22 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate), according to IDC, it's time for open-source vendors to lead and develop markets, not simply follow in the wake of established proprietary vendors, picking up their crumbs.
SpringSource is demonstrating how it can be done. It's an aggressive company with the finances, management, and product ambition to become a very big player in enterprise IT within just a few short years. It's a company that Microsoft should fear and that Oracle or IBM should buy.
Of course, SpringSource being SpringSource, it might actually be planning to buy Oracle or IBM instead.
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There was a time when vendors knew how to color inside the lines. A database vendor sold databases. An operating system vendor peddled operating systems. And application server vendors were in the business of selling application servers.
Customers knew what "application server" meant, which is what paved the way for low-cost, high-value open-source application servers like JBoss, Geronimo, and others to arise. The category was well understood. The only thing the customer had to decide was whether she wished to overspend on a brand-name application server or buy into an open-source upstart.
As the economy continues to pressure IT budgets, a new breed of application server is rising, one that doesn't color nicely within the lines of the traditional "app server" definition.
First there was SpringSource, which in April 2008 claimed it had developed the first "proper Java application server" to hit the market in more than 10 years. IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat (JBoss) must have found this surprising, given that "proper Java application servers" were what they presumed to be selling to their customers.
SpringSource, pressing the issue further, this week announced Spring Roo, an "interactive, lightweight, user-customizable tooling that enables rapid delivery of high-performance enterprise Java applications." At just 4MB, Spring Roo is tiny, but its promise is big: "working applications within 10 minutes of finishing the download" (video here).
Red Hat is taking notice of SpringSource's moves, but SpringSource founder Rod Johnson is dismissive of Red Hat's ability to compete:
Red Hat recently announced a defensive move (JBoss Open Choice strategy) motivated by trying to play catch-up with SpringSource. Clearly the momentum of SpringSource tc Server and dm Server has Red Hat worried, along with the continued advance of the Spring Framework as the de facto standard component model for enterprise Java.
The "JBoss Open Choice strategy" appears to be a repackaging, rather than new technology, which attempts to position JBoss as still relevant in a brave new world of changing requirements. On a positive note, it appears Red Hat has finally realized that many developers and customers have long since moved away from the full Java EE stack; that the traditional heavyweight application server has declined in importance; and that the Spring programming model is important to their customer base.
The paint is barely dry on JBoss' incursion into IBM's and Oracle's application server territory, and already it's under attack from SpringSource, which is positioning JBoss as old technology, despite barely being out of its teens. It's a sharp attack, but perhaps a sign of open-source competition to come.
Consider MindTouch. The entire idea of a Java application server got a shaking this week from MindTouch, which announced a new application packaging feature for its collaboration platform, as TechCrunch reports. This feature:
(A)llows developers to create a compressed file for import into other MindTouch instances, letting enterprise users install add-on applications easily. This addition represents MindTouch's ambitions to become an application platform where installing applications (is) as easy as adding Firefox add-ons.
This may not sound very groundbreaking, until you consider that MindTouch is essentially announcing that it has turned the wiki into an application platform. Until last year MindTouch was mostly known for its DekiWiki technology. This application-packaging technology basically allows customers to build on wiki collaboration, which is much more than just a MediaWiki-style wiki, as ReadWriteWeb notes.
Neither SpringSource nor MindTouch fit the old application server mold, but it's not clear customers should care. Enterprises just want to get work done.
Just as Google is shaking up e-mail with Wave and Wolfram Alpha is redefining a corner of search, so too are SpringSource and MindTouch redefining what application server means for the modern enterprise, while open-source companies like Acquia redefine Web content management, Marketcetera pushes the envelope on financial trading platforms, etc.
Open source is the new innovator, and not merely the commodifying force in the market.
Indeed, with traditional software markets perhaps reaching a critical saturation point, we may see much more "coloring outside the lines" in enterprise software from open-source projects and companies. Oracle's response has been to consolidate, but others seem to be responding with a different strategy: innovation.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch. Red Hat is a business partner. Acquia is in some ways a competitor.
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For all the discussion of the importance of transparency and openness on the Web today, it's very telling that the world's fastest-growing mobile platform may also be the most proprietary.
Apple wins rave reviews (including from me) on its technology but certainly not for its commitment to sharing its innovations with the world...unless, of course, you fork over $299 and sign a two-year mobile service commitment.
Indeed, Apple has earned the dubious honor of being more closed than Microsoft.
And yet, as Marc Hedlund reveals over on the O'Reilly Radar, application growth for the iPhone dwarfs that of the former leader in the smartphone category, PalmOS:
If openness matters so much, why is Apple doing so well with its uber-proprietary iPhone, just as Microsoft dominates the desktop with proprietary Windows?
There are at least two answers. One is that while Apple's iPhone (like Microsoft's Windows) isn't open in the open-source sense, it is open in the sense that it's easy to create applications that run on it. The second reason is that there's a huge financial incentive to do so, given the momentum behind the platform.
For some, these reasons aren't good enough, such as Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker:
Many of us participate in closed systems where the rules are set for us and we don't see them, certainly can't change them, and aren't permitted to "participate" in building the rules. This is true of very popular web services. For example, I "participate" in Flickr and Facebook, but within the system and rules that those organizations set up to meet their own goals. That's fine; there's no reason for those sites to change.
Mozilla is trying to build a layer of the Internet that's different, where "participation" extends to the very core of what we build.
With 40 percent of Mozilla's Firefox written by outside contributors, it's clear that an open platform works for Mozilla to build a better browser, which is why Mozilla continues to improve the ways in which developers can contribute to it. But it's equally clear that there are other ways to be "open to participation," ways that pay the rent for Apple, Microsoft, and huge ecosystems of commercial partners.
Is one platform approach better than another?
While it's clear that the world has room for both proprietary-but-open-enough and pureplay-open approaches to platform building, I favor the more open approach. The reason is that eventually, it appears proprietary approaches can collapse under their own weight.
Take Windows, for example. To maintain its growth, Microsoft has had to include more and more functionality in the operating system, stepping on the toes (or outright devouring the toes) of its erstwhile partners. (Interestingly, while discussing whether openness matters for Apple over Google Android, Slate describes Microsoft's Windows approach as open.)
Eventually, Windows grew to such heft that the market, including Microsoft partners, started looking for open alternatives, causing then Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to dub Linux Microsoft's "most potent operating system competitor." The "good enough" operating system that performed certain tasks much more efficiently and powerfully than Windows has now grown to seriously threaten Microsoft in a range of applications and markets.
Eventually, even Microsoft's desktop dominance may be threatened by Linux as new classes of easy-to-use, cost-effective devices like Netbooks arise.
Back to Apple. Today, Apple's iPhone seems set to rule the world because it enables a huge community of application developers to reach a paying audience. Tomorrow, however, Google (Android/Linux), Nokia (Symbian, Linux), Palm (WebOS/Linux), and even Microsoft (Windows Mobile) threaten its cozy corralling of the mobile market.
Microsoft has made it clear that it's possible to build a massive business with an "open enough" approach to platform development. The question is, can Microsoft (and Apple) maintain that without truly opening up?
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Years ago I proclaimed open source would never be relevant in the application market. Now I work for an open-source applications company.
Lesson? It's generally not a good idea to underestimate open source's potency.
To wit, here are three "Who would have thought open source could do that?" announcements that recently hit my RSS reader:
- NovusEdge is demoing open-source energy management for "massive commercial buildings." OpenRemote does open-source home automation, but this suggests the idea can take on a different scale.
- Human resource professionals spend time and money tracking job applicants. Well, now they can save their money by using open-source applicant-tracking applications. People used to say open source could only commodify broad application markets. I don't think this qualifies....
- Or how about applying open-source principles to other markets? I'm an advisor to the Open Source Teaching Project, which lowers barriers to quality education by "open sourcing" course curricula and delivering it online.
- While not new, it's also impressive to see proprietary software vendors investing in open source. Five years ago, would you have expected Citrix to invest in open-source router company Vyatta's $10 million Series C round of financing? Yes, it's an attack on Cisco by Citrix, and so driven by healthy self-interest, as The VAR Guy writes, but that's the point: the world is discovering plenty of self-interest in open source.
I'm sure open source is not good for something. I'm equally sure that deficiency won't last. It never does.
What are some of the more interesting applications you've seen for open source?
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