Open source's greatest strength may also be its Achilles' heel.
As a developer-driven phenomenon, much of the best open-source software ends up being written for other developers. For example, it's not surprising that Linux wins on the server (technical audience) but largely loses on the desktop (non-technical audience). Companies like Canonical and MindTouch can mitigate this by paying for usability design. But as an overall movement, it remains a weakness.
Apple has the opposite problem. It is religiously focused on usability, but struggles to open up to outside developers.
Even so, its attention to the user is something open source must emulate to reach the next level of adoption. Jason Snell of MacWorld writes:
Apple excels at creating products that the general public likes because the company is driven by design, not by engineering. Most tech products--heck, most products in general--aren't as good as they can be because they're put together by the people with the technical knowledge required to build them. And so the technical aspects of the product get pushed to the forefront.
The more complicated a product gets, the more technical acumen is required to put it together. Bad Web sites are built by people who know how to code HTML and JavaScript but don't understand how people use the Web. Bad software is written by people who are experts at knowing how a computer works and how to write code to make it do what they want, but no idea about how regular people behave and how those people expect to interact with that software.
Apple's the kind of company that makes decisions based on people, on users, and then challenges its engineers to find ways to fulfill those needs.
Why can't open source do this? Isn't there room in the open-source development process for the product manager, the focus group, and various other tools that software companies employ to determine what average users want and then to translate this into development plans?
The company (or project) that figures out how to do this will win.
Some projects already accomplish this to some extent. The strength of Mozilla, for example, is that it has figured out how to enable 40 percent of its development to be done by outside contributors, as BusinessWeek recently wrote. The downside is that these contributors are techies, but the upside is that they're techies who add language packs, accessibility features, and other "niche" areas that Mozilla might otherwise struggle to deliver.
This suggests a start: enable your open-source project to accept meaningful outside contributions that make the project reflective of a wider development community.
But the real goldmine is broadening the definition of "developer" to include lay users of your software. The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won.
Until that day, don't be surprised to see Microsoft, Apple, and their ilk win most battles for the hearts and minds of common users. This is why Google comes across as naive in asking open-source developers to help it fight Microsoft on the "desktop." It's not a market developers are well-equipped to win because they're aren't reflective of the vast majority of end users.
Most people don't care how the software is written, and care even less for the supposed elegance of a given program's code. They just want the software to work in an easy-to-use manner, to look nice, and to fit their budget.
Open source does the last one better than most, but struggles at times with the first two. Fix that problem and open source will know no boundaries.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Enterprise IT struggles to overcome the risk of vendor lock-in, the risk of IT project delivery failure, and a range of other risks.
However, as Julien Le Nestour expertly elucidates, the biggest risk for enterprise IT is a dearth of user adoption.
With this risk in mind, Le Nestour suggests that enterprise IT revise its strategies for evaluating and purchasing software with the user in mind:
(T)he IT function needs to change its mindset and view of itself. Instead of deploying tools where user adoption is taken for granted, IT leaders must realize they're competing with other applications and need to win the employee's business, just as any product available on the consumer market.
Obvious, right? Well, if you've ever worked with or for enterprise IT, you know that it's not. All sorts of considerations go into an IT strategy: user adoption, unfortunately, is not always at the top of the list of considerations.
Taking a different slant on a Biblical phrase, "enterprise IT was made for users, not users for enterprise IT." In other words, enterprise applications should fit into the world that their intended users already live within, and not force them to learn a completely novel language of productivity.
It need not be this way. Facebook and other new applications have shown that IT need not be cumbersome to be powerful. We need more such "consumerization of IT." Otherwise, we're left with software that costs much and does little, because its intended audience does little with it.
This is one reason that I recommend that enterprises evaluate open-source applications. They may well prove to be as user-unfriendly as more traditional enterprise IT, but the difference is that their licensing allows an IT department to fully evaluate open source with users before making a subscription purchase, if any.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
There's a great article in Forbes about Jive taking a collaboration fight to Microsoft's SharePoint play. Its primary weapon? Ease of use and ease of integration.
[Jive's] strategy for competing with giants: work alongside them. Oracle and SAP bundle Jive's discussion forum software into their portal applications. The version of Clearspace released in April lets users search for and link to SharePoint content from within Clearspace and sync their Clearspace and Microsoft Outlook calendars. For customers who use both, Jive becomes the user-friendly portal for SharePoint's sophisticated but clunky file system.
Earlier this week I heard the same said of Atlassian by at least two companies with whom I was meeting. Atlassian makes excellent products that are easy to use. People want to use them rather than being forced to use them. In both cases business users are as likely to recommend the product as IT.
Jive and Atlassian, like Google and Apple, demonstrate an absolute essential for winning the software wars of the 21st Century: You've got to have easy distribution, and you've got to be mind-numbingly easy to use.
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