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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."
Stanford, the birthplace of SUN, one of the renowned distributors of a once true and mighty closed and proprietary Unix, that almost fell off the face of the planet in part of it starting to become irrelevant compared to open sourced OS's and systems (Linux, BSD, etc).
The SAME Sun, which has now open sourced almost their ENTIRE IP portfolio in the Open Solaris project, thereby bringing relevancy BACK to Solaris and it's suite of products.
The same Sun which utilizes hundreds of code donors to it's projects, and big communities around storage, ZFS, etc.
Closed, commercial systems have a place, and many of them do well, but when markets change, can they change quickly enough? Lessons show us that they cannot change quickly enough. Or do the closed proprietary systems try and change the market the suit their needs?
Look at IBM, HP, Sun, and even Dell now relying on open *nix systems driving huge sales numbers.
The markets have changed, its those who do not follow trends, or fight the trends who become irrelevent.
The open source model will probably change in a decade, or a century and it too will have to change.
The paper is just a way to appeal to stiffley business suit class of people afraid of change.
Brent Jones
Not neccesarily. This argument is commonly abused. Capital is needed for the production of certain (a few, certainly not all - as we know) creative works. Commercial films and software would be nothing like what they are today without capital to pay the developers for all their efforts. It is therefor logical to charge a fee for reproduction in order to repay the debt that development incurred. It's also not too impolite to try to make a profit.
There is a point where all these things start to go wrong. These companies will all start to try to maintain monopoly status, and sabotage competition in any way possible. They will hold on to a work which is long out of date (particularly the movie industry, but software companies also do this) and continue to milk the population long after the initial debt has been made and several people have become filthy rich. They will completely ignore market situations and the customer's needs and charge whatever they want for their products.
Software is one of those products that does not require a lot of equipment to produce, just a lot of time. There are plenty of people in this world who have way too much time on their hands (damn I wish I was one of these) and invest it in free software. Over the years free software has evolved to be surprise competition in the software market which used to be (and still is, depending on your views) the playground of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Adobe, ect, ect. Since there is now competition, it would seem logical for the price of this commercial software to drop - but to avoid that, we apparently designed a whole college course on how to break all the rules and play unfair.
I threw away another couple mod points to write this :/