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Re: how well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo’s? (2)

ONE MORE THOUGHT on why I think Hugh McLeod has missed the boat this time.

Fact #1: ‘hacking something in your garage’ isn’t for startups anymore. Has it ever? You innovate or you go out of business.

Fact #2: businesses use software to breath, move, run, act. The agility of their software infrastructure determines their agility in the real world.

In that situation, you’d be foolish to trust anyone to be as agile as you need to be. As innovative as you must be. Changes come quickly and software vendors have too many balls in the air to keep track of your situation. Open Source weakens vendor dependency and empowers companies to respond to change with greater agility - because there are no secrets in the code. Anyone can take over if the original vendor can’t or won’t keep up with you.

That’s a value shareholders and CxOs should recognize.

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April 17, 2007 | Filed Under Open Source 

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2 Responses to “Re: how well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo’s? (2)”

  1. hugh macleod on April 17th, 2007

    I am fully aware of the merits of Open Source… at least, from a neophyte perspective, anyway.

    I simply posed the question, if OS is as good as people say it is, and it’s free, how then do MS make a living? Something doesn’t add up that the OS folk aren’t telling me.

  2. Tomas Kohl on April 17th, 2007

    Talking about the OS, and on the desktop only, even if somebody came up with a perfect one, it wouldn’t matter. Windows is THE infrastructure of desktop applications, so switching would mean spending tons of money on other applications as well. And plenty of applications essential to businesses are only available for Windows. So you could say Microsoft has a pretty solid vendor lock-in here.

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