Open source can't be used for differentiation
Open source can’t be used for differentiation
Despite 20 years of using, analyzing, and marketing open source, I still don’t really understand how vendors can use it strategically. The only thing I know so far is that to make money you have to sell something.
If you give away your product for free, competitors will just use it, and extend it, adding proprietary differentiation. This is what Amazon does that freaks out open source startups. In addition to just using the open source software as their own products, they add the differentiation of running and managing it for you, and putting it into the whole of AWS. [Insert platform strategy effect wizard commentary here.]
Buyers too easily believe that they don’t need to pay for support or boring enterprise features like Active Directory integration. Whether it makes business sense or not, these no-longer buyers will do the work themselves, paying with their own time and future headaches instead of paying a vendor. Perhaps 6 to 12 months after trying on their own, they’ll do a 6 month PoC to bring a vendor in. That’s a painfully long sales cycle.
So, as a vendor, you have to decide if any given type of software is a commodity or proprietary. The lower down the stack, the more commodity it might be (though virtual networks are an interesting exception). Also, having a full integrated stack and platform that can’t be broken up (and still work as easily) works too: all the parts of Apple are less valuable on their own, and the same for public clouds, maybe. It’s the gestalt strategy.
As ever, to sell product at a higher price, a business needs product that is different than the other options. The alternative is to sell at a cheaper prices.
(I suppose if you were the only open source option…that might be something. Then you’re competing against people freely using your open source stuff. You still need something proprietary to sell…?)
My dump-truck
This is currently my kid’s and my’s favorite clip that we say as we hurtle through the day
Original programming
This week’s Software Defined Talk is just Brandon and I. I get all vague and spacey:
The Jez Humble/Life Insurance Renewal PDF Continuum
Coté proposes that there’s three types of apps to pay attention to in enterprises. Or something like that. Also, he has a magical method for doing digital transformation: actually do it. We open up discussing the delightful adventure of doing analyst feature matrixes. Also, some brief discussion of Apple Watches in the impeachment trial.
Relative to your interests
- Weaveworks Welcomes Cloud Computing Expert, Cornelia Davis - “Pivotal PaaS” And: “Cloud Foundry, which the Pivotal PaaS is based on, is a platform that leverages two things that are also central to Kubernetes, containers and reconciliation loops. But there is one very important difference between the two. In CF the use of containers and reconciliation loops are implementation details largely hidden from the end user. By contrast, Kubernetes exposes these as primitives - first class entities - that the users have direct access to. And so, when you configure a Kubernetes deployment you specify the container image that you want to run. You also have the ability to configure certain elements of the reconciliation loop that will care for instances of that container image.”
- Lots of RFID and tracking in stores - “Profitect, a company purchased last year by Zebra Technologies, makes analytics software that tracks items using RFID tags as they move throughout the store. The software can determine if the items are behaving “normally” — such as by traveling through an aisle, stopping at a checkout counter, and then leaving — or in an “abnormal” fashion, such as by sitting idly behind a counter or in a storage area before being carried off-premise.”
- Testing business ideas in meatspace - All about A/B testing in the real world, mostly in retail. Also, it’s amazing how much customers are manipulated by retailers, for example: changing prices from ending in .99 to .25 results in 30% not dog biscuit sales.
- Chow Sang Sang, case study - ‘Chow Sang Sang is building a new generation of omnichannel sales of physical and online stores, which correspondingly requires the company’s IT to become an “all-channel” platform to achieve agile IT and support agile business. Because it used to be a standalone system, Chow Sang Sang also needs to establish a full cloud architecture, including splitting a large Oracle library into an independently expandable, distributed database.’
- The number of the best - “Whereas 150 is sometimes referred to as the “Dunbar number”, the academic himself in fact refers to a range of figures. He observes that humans tend to have five intimate friends, 15 or so good friends, around 50 social friends and 150-odd acquaintances.”
- Google Anthos - “The main benefit is that developers get to use a single set of tools to build and deploy their apps, and push through updates as necessary, regardless of the actual infrastructure on which those apps are hosted. Kubernetes comes into play by making it easier to manage large clusters of those containerized apps.”
- The 5-15 email update method - “It’s intended to take no more than five minutes to read and 15 minutes to write.”
- Marketing your programming awesomeness - good for all technical marketing, developer relations, etc. Also, the same guy on things technical leadership should be doing.
- A good “what is Project Pacific” talk - just 10 minutes, too.
- “Aspirational Intelligence” - “ML systems make decisions without any explanation and it’s difficult to determine the value of their black box decisions. But if those results are presented as artificial intelligence then they get far higher respect from people than they likely deserve.”
- “bot masters” - automating call centers and help desks.
- Organization complexity creates more bugs
- It is a nice place
- TV and comic books rot the brain - “In most cases, they say, the phone is just a mirror that reveals the problems a child would have even without the phone.” Meanwhile: maybe it’s not The Kids that are the problem.
- Working alone - “individuals who typically work alone, worry alone, and tend to be stoic until the end.”
Untitled | Michael Coté | Flickr
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