Slashdot Mirror
On Emulation and Transmeta
Curious writes "The Economist this week talks about the growing use of
emulation technology and Transmeta's newest patent involving hardware/software hybrid in multi-host emulation."
Whatever they emulate, their employees win Harley's at
conferences, so they're doing something right.
Hands-down, the finest mainstream, English-language dead-tree thingy in the world. But even they can't breach the Transmeta Cone of Silence.
The Economist makes all the other "hard news" weekly magazines look like People magazine. The reason this is so is very cool, and possibly offers a business model for free software.
Most news magazines make money based on advertising, and the ad rates are directly dependent on the magazines circulation. So there is an economic incentive for the magazine to expand its circulation, which more-or-less translates into trading hard news for fluff -- movie reviews, "News you can use," that sort of stuff.
So how does The Economist avoid this trap?
Simple -- The Economist is a loss-leader for the company that publishes it. They make their real money by doing analyses of political and economic trends for big companies, governments and think tanks, and they charge big dollars for these analyses. Now, someone who is going to fork over thousands and thousands of dollars for analyses of, say, the political situation in the Uzbekhistan, wants some guarantees that their analyst isn't talking out of his butt.
By publishing The Economist, the Economist Intelligence Unit (I think that's the name), basically shows their stuff to the world. They say, "If you want to know what kind of work we do, go check out the Economist magazine." So the magazine is basically advertising for their custom analyses.
This means that they have a really strong incentive to publish genuinely in-depth and thoughtful news coverage. If they publish garbage they will lose their reputation for quality, and they die.
So how does this relate to free software? It's probably possible to build a software business along very similar lines. You have a firm that primarily writes custom software for clients, and establishes a reputation for quality by releasing free software.
If someone asks, "How do I know you aren't a gang of cowboy coders who write unstable trashware?" the firm can point to its free software as proof of its ability to write solid, well-designed programs -- the source is available for inspection and proof of the firm's ability.