Best Presentation on Software Business and OSS

stephe writes "Brent Williams presented 'Open Source Business Models: A Wall Street Look at a Wild 2006 and the Prospects for Even More Fun in 2007' at EclipseCon last Tuesday. Brent is (temporarily) an independent equity research analyst, who moved to Wall Street after 20 years in the software trenches. He starts with a tear-down of the Oracle Linux debate and the Microsoft Novell deal. I especially like his taking apart the commoditization myth and his observations around interface standards versus standards of implementation. He graciously allowed me to post the slides on my blog. They're getting a lot of interest from the open source business crowd, and I thought the Slashdot crowd would want to see them as well. Enjoy."

Comments

First thought from first slide...

[Zapraki]

Can I really take the guy seriously when he's using a hotmail account?

Re:First thought from first slide...

[Zapraki]

Ya, sorry, I didn't mean to sound snobby. It just frustrates me when people insist on sticking with what is an inferior solution (imho), when much better ones are there for the taking, with basically nothing extra required.

Although I guess the very weakness of hotmail is what could prevent people from changing. No forwarding?? If somebody had a long list of contacts who emailed that account, they might have to stick it out rather than risk losing contacts with a switch over. Or else maintain multiple accounts, which could be even worse.

And yes, haha, may Outlook burn and burn.

premium brands ignoring price competition?

[turing_m]

FTA:
"What price changes did Red Hat make immediately in the wake of
the Oracle announcement?
- None. Zero, zip, nada.
- We're not hearing of any individual deal discounting.
- Red Hat knows that they have a premium brand, so ignoring people
competing on price is the right strategy.The role of a premium brand
- Lamborghini ignores price competition between Hyundai and Kia.
- Oracle ignores price competition between MySQL and PostgreSQL."

This is not the case at all. In the last few years, MySQL has matured and more people have found out about PostgreSQL (in fact, PostgreSQL is probably the best kept secret OSS has to offer - it has a kick ass feature set and it's completely and utterly free). For a large amount of enterprise stuff, PostgreSQL is more than adequate and as a bonus, does not treat your data as garbage.

Anyone considering building some sort of database application has the option of spending a couple months (with change left over) from the money they would spend on an Oracle license, and invest it in learning PostgreSQL. At the current rate of developement, it will in all likelihood solve any future problem they could have. For free. No worries about licenses. Anyone in a startup where money is tight and time is cheap should be considering PostgreSQL.

This has had direct ramifications on the strategy of all the big database players. At the very least, they all now have a free entry level option to compete with OSS competitors.

Re:The Car/Software analogy strikes again!

[RuBLed]

There are chairs on both Page 40 and Page 43. That might have confused him although I believe the chair on Page 43 is not designed to be comfortable.

Source - EclipseCon

[NovaX]

Perhaps the editors could have taken the slides from the source, rather than an opportunistic blogger who couldn't handle the bandwidth?

Tech Session
PDF slides