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Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source
mjasay writes "As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor ... to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors."
They should have left their research closed. Now anyone can take their research, reverse engineer it, and repackage it under a Creating Commons license.
What makes me laugh is that there is such an "Us Vs Them" tone in all of it.
Right. And the discussion below won't have a similar tone... :)
What makes me laugh is that there is such an "Us Vs Them" tone in all of it. It's like the nice business people think that all the open source guys are just waiting to kill their babies!
Wait, thats not our ultimate goal? I dedicated my life to a lie!
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
It's like the nice business people think that all the open source guys are just waiting to kill their babies! I mean settle down.
I agree, they really have nothing to worry about in this regard. The open source baby killing project is not even in beta yet, and there are compatibility and dependency issues that will keep it out of the linux kernel for quite some time. The closed-source world, especially Microsoft, is years ahead of OSS when it comes to infant termination software. But if there's anyone out there in slashdot-land who would like to lend a hand please grab the sources from freshmeat and pitch in!
I always wondered why they called it that...
Well, they *have* been known to kill their wives. :-(
I.e business types.
All your base are belong to Wii.
The closed-source world, especially Microsoft, is years ahead of OSS when it comes to infant termination software
Well... my copy just failed with a Vaginal Ring of Death... I demand a 3 year warranty and diapers for my newborn...
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Quite the opposite! It's them vs. us.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/