As I’ve said before, success in the new ‘adoption led’ era of software is about maintaining a great experience - like this example. I don’t care whether Rob is a paying customer or not today - what I do care about is his future potential to influence - multiply that by 20 million. Let’s hope […]
Category Archive for 'Business'
I’m not even tempted to gloat about Sun’s Q3 news and I think it’s a shame that Wall St. will be demanding Sun to shrink back to profitability as a result. Having RIFs (Reduction In Force) hanging over the workforce is completely demoralizing - I know - I survived at least five. Sun were starting […]
Spring & GPL v3
Posted in Business, open source on Apr 30th, 2008
Talking of Spring - SpringSource’s choice of license for their new ‘platform’ seems to have sparked some discussion over on TSS.
In a way - it’s sad that a perfectly decent product launch is over-shadowed by their choice of license - we (the OpenSource community) still clearly have work to do.
I haven’t decided whether their […]
Oracle closed the $8.5bn BEA deal today following the nod of approval from the EC. Now the check (cheque) has cleared - it will be interesting to see what happens next.
A couple of related articles hit my (nicely organized) feed reader this morning. First, Tim Bray paints a bleak picture of Google’s Developer Platform - some concerns I shared earlier. Meanwhile CogHead are in the news with their Open Definition model - an attempt to build an open and collaborative environment for CogHead customers. Interesting […]
Sowing Seeds
Posted in Business, Marketing, open source on Apr 11th, 2008
In my (albeit short) experience of building a business based on Open Source; I’ve realized that demand generation is much more consumer (or individual) oriented - hence traditional marketing is no longer sufficient.
An adoption-led market needs passionate consumers. Offering great products is a start; but investing in your community and building passion for your technology […]
Microsoft’s Dilema
Posted in Business on Apr 11th, 2008
We (continue to) live in interesting times. It will be intersting to see how Microsoft fare over the next five years; the knives are drawn - Gartner claims that Microsoft’s troubles are a result of their past success - ie they’re overly burdedned by their installed base in a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilema. […]
Show me the Money
Posted in Business, Red Hat, open source on Mar 18th, 2008
Matt Assay provides some good reading as usual this morning. He’s tried to correlate stock prices of a few companies who base some or part of their business on Open Source with their “Open Source Business Maturity”. Essentially he’s plotted the stock price (ie. the financial market’s appraisal of the company) of Red Hat, Novell […]