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.
Why does Google's spate of disclosures in the last 24 hours constitute a positive development? Now we get to see what Google is really made of. You don't earn your corporate chops in a boom. Let's face it. When the profits are flowing, Google could burp, and people would fawn over it. A stock price north of $700 makes everyone look like a genius, and you can go on engineering benders. In a downturn, companies show what they are about.
For me, the clearest indication of this at Google is the shuttering of a range of products, including Google Video (or, at least, the ability to upload new content there), Google Notebook, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, and others. Google understands that products have to be profitable to persist. Closing out the clunkers is a very good sign for Google's product vision.
At the same time, Google becomes ever more aggressive in its use of open source, most recently releasing an open-source site map generator.
Why does this matter? I think it demonstrates that Google understands that it needs to replenish the "commons" from which it has derived so much value, so as to ensure that open source is a renewable resource. This is a grown-up attribute: thought for the future, not merely the present.
Google already has 69.5 percent of the search market. As it prudently manages growth through the downturn, companies such as Microsoft won't be able to pretend to be unconcerned with data points like Gmail's 43 percent growth in 2008, as TechCrunch reports.
Google, in short, has long won by default. Now it's winning because it's managing its business prudently, not simply throwing ideas at the wall and hoping that a few stick.
It's unfortunate that Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth doesn't blog more often, because when he does, it's invariably insightful. As a case in point, Mark's post about the superiority of open source at hitting release dates is wonderful. He writes:
Most people would assume that precise release management would depend on having total control of all the moving parts - and hence only be possible in a proprietary setting. Microsoft writes (almost) every line of code in Windows, so you would think they would be able to set, and hit, a precise target date for delivery.
But in fact the reverse is true - free software distributions or OSV's can provide much better assurances with regard to delivery dates than proprietary OSV's, because we can focus on the critical role of component selection, integration, testing, patch management and distribution rather than the pieces which upstream projects are better able to handle - core component feature development.
Unfortunately, it may not be true. At least, not the extent that I'd wish it.
... Read moreIn an insightful post, Paul Young calls into question the viability of open source's utility for average end-user applications when not tempered by product management. It's a long, well-reasoned argument, one that I highly recommend everyone read.
In speaking about the Pidgin controversy, Young writes:
Obviously, there is a huge gap between the expectations of the users and the developers [on the Pidgin project]. Who normally bridges that gap? Product Management.
... Read more
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