Musings on the world of software from the sharp end of the long tail
Posted in Business on Jul 6th, 2008
Some good commentary on Microsoft’s Vista flop on SeekingAlpha – interestingly Windows XP sales are booming. This creates an interesting situation for Microsoft. As I’ve mentioned before – they’re increasingly competing against some fast moving competitors (Linux and OS/X) with some very old, quickly decaying technology (Windows XP). So while selling XP might make short [...]
RHEL runs on the biggest baddest (and fastest) supercomputer (IBM’s Roadrunner) which uses the same Cell processor as the PS3. And you can also run RHEL on the PS3 – I’m sure there’s a rational and practical reason to run RHEL on a PS3 – I just can’t think what it is. The Hibernate lawsuit [...]
Posted in Business on Jun 9th, 2008
There’s been an interesting thread on the “Open Source Business’ Glass Ceiling” over the last couple of months that I’ve been meaning to comment on. I think Marten Mickos’ initial categorization of customer willingness to pay for support is perhaps a little too simplistic; or maybe too abstract. As a recap – Marten asserts that [...]
Posted in Business, Enterprise, Red Hat, Technology on Jun 5th, 2008
JBoss.org has had unparalleled success in launching innovative OSS tech. into the enterprise – something not lost on the folks at Railo. More on Sacha’s blog Bill Burke, esteemed JBoss old-timer and fellow at Red Hat continues to make progress with RESTEasy (an implementation of JSR-311 aka JAX-RS) – if my inbox is anything to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]