Open Source & Future Ahead -Part 1

Bob Cringley writes that retiring baby boomers are going to invigorate open source. He points out every industry has its moments of transition, its highs and lows, and they can be frequently linked to aging products and aging producers of those products. Non-commodity products have lifecycles. So while higher profit margins can come from products based on older technology, that trend continues only for a certain time before it falls off a marketing cliff and suddenly nobody is buying the stuff. That's why companies spend the money to bring out new product lines because failing to do so kills companies. While assessing the effects of demographics and business environment change, he adds that we're likely to have an influx of talent into Open Source projects, supplanting the mid-20s geeks that have been pushing that business. Gary Beach wrote that Microsoft might be able to make even more money with an openVista version. He adds that microsoft shareholders might embrace the idea because the future research and development and headcount costs of openVista would arguably be lower, allowing the company to invest in other areas like higher-margin servers, mobile devices and home entertainment.

Matt Asay,the new executive at Alfresco, writes after listening to Jason Matusow that a monolithic view of Microsoft is as inaccurate as it is useless. Microsoft is clearly not taking a passive-aggressive approach to Opensource. Jason’s keynotes/sessions of OSBC Boston are available here. Jason largely debunks the popular but erroneous belief that open source (and the web) enable true "Long Tail" distribution strategies. Matt says that Jason argued convincingly that Microsoft is starting to understand and apply (at a pace faster than most of us would have thought possible) the lessons of open source. While Microsoft will have difficulty separating itself from the Office and Windows umbilical cords, and these will ultimately strangle its opportunities for growth ("Live" notwithstanding) and opensource may give it the needed breath to maneuver. I shall provide my views in Part II of this post.

Category :Opensource