According to JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design, there is a genuine war for talent.
JP Ranagaswami
(Credit: Dan Farber)But the way to attract talent isn't with the most money or best perks but through openness, he said, speaking at Supernova 2008. Companies need to be open to competition, such as partnering with competitors in some areas; open to innovation in terms of creating an environment that encourages new ideas; and open to changes, Rangaswami said.
The talent pool comes from both inside and outside a firm. "Open, multisided platforms are the only way to get to the talent pool," Rangaswami explained. "Once you assume you are in a war for talent, the root to competition is network-based and multisided in terms of supply chain, partners, customers, competitors, and employees," Rangaswami said. "It means you have to set up an environment where all can participate, which is exactly the sort of thing that works without lock in. The way to keep an ecosystem in balance turns out to be the value a community brings."
As part of the value of openness, BT is exposing its assets to the market openly, with widgets, SDKs, and Web services, and investing in open-source projects. BT acquired Osmosoft, the maker of TiddleyWiki, in 2007. It had one person and no assets, but an open community laden with talent, Rangaswami said.
"The issue is being able to connect to people, and to lower transaction and repair costs. The market is about network-based competition...about institutions and relationships, not about businesses and portfolios. We have to be able to reengineer who we are," Rangaswami said. "The talent coming out of schools today will make choices based on which firms have the most open and transparent set of values. Openness means having no place to hide...it is changing the way we think. It is no longer an option. It's an ecosystem rather than a set of hierarchical things."
Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source, according to CEO Tariq Krim.
"We want to compete with Google widgets," Krim said. "Our container supports Google widgets and every other platform. If we release our code, people will leverage it and grow the reach of our platform."
Krim hopes that supporting a broad range of platforms, including Windows Vista and Windows Live, Mac OS X, Opera, Yahoo, and Google, will inspire the developer community to adopt and innovate on the Netvibes platform.
Netvibes will make money with sponsored widgets, Netvibe Universes, and business services. Opening up the code to developers will enable them to compete on more equal footing with Netvibes as well.
Bret Taylor, formerly of Google and now of FriendFeed, has a greater appreciation for the business development function. In a post today he wrote about the challenges of getting legal access to factual data--such as mapping, stock quotes, white pages, TV schedules, movie show times, and sports scores--for use in applications.
If you want to experiment with a new driving directions algorithm, it is infinitely more difficult than coming up with an algorithm; you have to hire a lawyer and a sign a contract with a company that collects that data in the country you are developing for.
Bret Taylor: Free the data
He adds that some of the data has quality problems or is incomplete. In sum, Taylor believes that innovation is stymied and the barrier to entry is raised in the current environment. It's not just the need for lawyers and contracts but also the issue of companies that sell data restricting use.
What the solution to freeing up the data? Taylor advocates open-sourcing factual data, and competing on use of the data, not access to it. He wrote:
To this end, I think we should create a Wikipedia for data: a global database for all of these important data sources to which we all contribute and that anyone can use. When a user reports an inaccurate phone number in your products, save it back to the DataWiki so everyone can benefit, and in return, you get everyone else's improvements as well. If your local movie theater doesn't have listings data in DataWiki, you can type it in yourself, and everyone in your town can benefit, and all the products you use that access movie listings will automatically update. Need better mapping data for a city? Pay to collect it, and upload it to the DataWiki. In return you get all the other cities other companies paid for (sort of like a company contributing device drivers to the Linux kernel).
For centuries, companies have made money in exchange for doing the busy work of collecting, massaging, and publishing factual data. The same was true for encyclopedia data until recently. Taylor is definitely onto something, but it presents some real data collection challenges. The open-source community is sure to take up the challenge.
The question is, will the companies that already have the data be of assistance? It's not exactly in their best financial interest to give away their content, but the example of Wikipedia should give them the incentive to press the pause button.
See also: Sarah Perez discusses where to find open data on the Web, such as CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), OpenStreetMap and Freebase.
Blog network GigaOm has launched OStatic to cover open-source software.
OStatic is an example of GigaOm's beyond-blogging approach, integrating various services as part of a more complete microsite. In addition to blogs, OStatic includes a comprehensive directory of 150,000 open-source applications (similar to SourceForge), 30,000 closed-source applications, and a question-and-answer forum similar to Yahoo Answers. Readers can participate by contributing product reviews.
"We plant to track open source as a business and to make it easy to access information about various open-source projects," said Om Malik, founder and editor of GigaOm.
OStatic has about nine contributors who will be blogging about the news and events shaking up the open-source world.
The timing is right for OStatic as evidenced by growing acceptance of open source in corporations and the increasing valuations of open-source companies, Malik said. Sun Microsystems, for example, recently acquired MySQL for $1 billion.
OStatic was built in conjunction with Vox Holdings.
(Credit:
GigaOm)
- prev
- 1
- next
