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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."
Not only that, but these are companies you have actually heard of. Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Google are all companies that produce open source software and actually make money from it. Not to mention pure open source companies like Zope and Zend.
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The paper is freely available for everybody to learn from, in fact the Jan-Feb 2008 issue is fully of very interesting article (what month are we in now?).
Good point. Most people don't know that for $250 a year you can get Desktop support from Canonical, the company who owns *buntu trademarks. They'll even do engineering for you for a fee.
You have Ivy League Full Time MBA. These tend to make the biggest Jerks of bosses. These Kids think they are special and entitled and tend to treat people under them like dirt while they bring the company to the ground.
Next it is the Ivy League Part TIme MBA. These guys often have real business experience and know what it feels to be the little guy. But being from such a well known school they still often get high end jobs much quicker then their experience shows and still kill the company.
Wow, someone here sure sounds a little frustrated.
You fail to consider that what you call "Ivy League Full Time MBAs" have an average age of 27-28, meaning generally 5-6 years of business experience. Also, given the tough requirements to get in to one of the top 5-10 MBA schools (I'm sure you weren't only referring to Ivies, but also for instance Sloan, Stanford and Kellogg), these are already overachievers by the time they start their MBA. They've already climbed fast, worked their asses off, and gained much more experience than most people. And they're smart.
I'm pretty sure that if graduates from top MBAs consistently ran companies into the ground, companies wouldn't be hiring them, and they wouldn't be top MBA schools anymore.
Let's face it, these guys are either smarter (maybe not in all aspects, but with respect to their work) or more devoted to their work than you are, and that's why they succeed and are paid huge salaries. No need to be bitter.
This space up for sale.
Sigh. You're understanding of the software industry is so pedestrian that it is impossible to have a serious conversation with you.
Those little boxes on the shelves in Walmart are not the software industry. They're not even a significant percentage of it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ahh, the great meritocracy of the American Dream. Ignoring race, class, gender (even though you catched it with you 'generic he' usage), nationality and so on and in-linked systems of oppression... priceless, literally.