Please lets get back to our browser war discussions before the women reading slashdot take notice and decide that we really aren't a good idea after all.
Oh yeah! Thank goodness someone noticed how wide this thread is opening the nerd kimono. Hehehe.
I'm not saying that there
doesn't need to be leadership, but I think most companies are to
salary heavy where there is no value-add to the product. Most technical people feel this way. Yet most companies find that they eventually need to bring non-technical leadership on board -- even those that grew up under the leadership of great technical minds. So I wouldn't say "no value-add", but I think every company needs to pause occasionally and re-evaluate the mix of technical and non-technical leadership. Many great companies fail when one group or the other become too dominant.
Thank you for posting this one -- I was looking for someone to make these points. I hope it gets modded insightful.
What I would add is that there are plenty of business models that can grow up around and in conjunction with F/OSS. Some of them are quite lucrative. They're just very different models to Micosoft's "money printing" ones. It also helps for companies to be a little more visionary and get ahead of trends that are going to disrupt them. I think something hampering Microsoft from being in front of these trends is that they haven't really decided what their core business is or should be (end user applications, middleware, search, operating systems -- or something else). Looking ahead, "something else" seems like the right answer since their other choices are already either commoditized or locked up.
If you look at the IBM experience, breaking up the company was not the answer to save them from the brink -- and they have embraced open source. But then, IBM had "software as a service" (rented software) as a core part of its business model since the 1960s.
Electroshock therapy is not a game, and it is not a joke. It is a choice, a radical therapy, and it is also 60 percent effective. I am asking you to remove your comment from circulation out of respect for the millions of patients who have undergone Electro-Convulsive Therapy.
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Oh yeah! Thank goodness someone noticed how wide this thread is opening the nerd kimono. Hehehe.
Thank you for posting this one -- I was looking for someone to make these points. I hope it gets modded insightful.
What I would add is that there are plenty of business models that can grow up around and in conjunction with F/OSS. Some of them are quite lucrative. They're just very different models to Micosoft's "money printing" ones. It also helps for companies to be a little more visionary and get ahead of trends that are going to disrupt them. I think something hampering Microsoft from being in front of these trends is that they haven't really decided what their core business is or should be (end user applications, middleware, search, operating systems -- or something else). Looking ahead, "something else" seems like the right answer since their other choices are already either commoditized or locked up.
If you look at the IBM experience, breaking up the company was not the answer to save them from the brink -- and they have embraced open source. But then, IBM had "software as a service" (rented software) as a core part of its business model since the 1960s.
Electroshock therapy is not a game, and it is not a joke. It is a choice, a radical therapy, and it is also 60 percent effective. I am asking you to remove your comment from circulation out of respect for the millions of patients who have undergone Electro-Convulsive Therapy.