If you play with fire, you’ll get burned. Exactly same happened to me in the post Cloud Perspectives, in which I had wandered off my usual comfort zones and with proper amount of clumsiness stumbled upon the topic I haven’t been able to describe properly. As it was too late to delete it, I am bound to explain myself properly.
We we all agree the technology is driven by the innovation and the value added to its users. At the beginning of every progression there’s an innovation that demonstrates potential economic value assigned to something previously not recognized or possible. In most areas the innovation (IP) and it’s strategic value plays important part in the establishing or changing market place. Once the strategic value drops significantly, either by increased competition or by mass adoption, commodization is taking progress. From technology perspective it usually happens by:
- standardization
- adoption growth not manageable by a single or limited number of entities
- transfer of IP to 3rd parties
- containment of innovation itself in the mainstream know-how
In the process of commodification the competitive rivalry of the market will sooner or later face the loss of added value and therefore diminishing strategic value of particular innovation and diversity of competitors – finishing the process of commodification by the containment of original idea in the general know-how. Which will created environment best described as a pure competition (see Porter’s Five Force Analysis [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_5_forces_analysis]).
Now let’s take the Open Source into the equation. The movement itself is already recognized by doing all of this – removing technological barriers for adoption, providing a platform for innovation, reducing the cost of ownership compared to the proprietary technologies and establishing new environment for de-facto standardization of selected projects. Which, on its own, should give us perfect strategic way of achieving technology commodization.
The question remains though. Right now Open Source has been reduced to handful of products in order to simplify it and come up with the new business model. But reality is much more complex. Open source has been one of the major enablers of what we’re calling cloud computing, changing technological landscape as we knew it. As noted by Roman in his original post, the cloud environment comes with different layer of interaction. The technological challenges we’ve faced before are already recognized and therefore commodified. Now it’s a question what new projects (or frameworks) swe’ll have to solve the new challenges? Or better – as service nature of cloud computing changed the impact of open source is there a way how to project an open source ideas into them as well?
If you play with fire, you’ll get burned. Exactly same happened to me in the post Cloud Perspectives, in which I had wandered off my usual comfort zones and with proper amount of clumsiness stumbled upon the topic I haven’t been able to describe properly. As it was too late to delete it, so I am bound to explain myself properly.
We we all agree the technology is driven by the innovation and the value added to its users. At the beginning of every progression there’s an innovation that demonstrates potential economic value assigned to something previously not recognized or possible. In most areas the innovation (IP) and it’s strategic value plays important part in the establishing or changing market place. Once the strategic value drops significantly, either by increased competition or by mass adoption, commodization is taking progress. From technology perspective it usually happens by:
- standardization
- adoption growth not manageable by a single or limited number of entities
- transfer of IP to 3rd parties
- containment of innovation itself in the mainstream know-how
In the process of commodification the competitive rivalry of the market will sooner or later face the loss of added value and therefore diminishing strategic value of particular innovation and diversity of competitors – finishing the process of commodification by the containment of original idea in the general know-how. Which will created environment best described as a pure competition (see Porter’s Five Force Analysis).
Now let’s take the Open Source into the equation. The movement itself is already recognized by doing all of this – removing technological barriers for adoption, providing a platform for innovation, reducing the cost of ownership compared to the proprietary technologies and establishing new environment for de-facto standardization of selected projects. Which, on its own, should give us perfect strategic way of achieving technology commodization.
The question remains though. Right now Open Source has been reduced to handful of products in order to simplify it and come up with the new business model. But reality is much more complex. Open source has been one of the major enablers of what we’re calling cloud computing, changing technological landscape as we knew it. As noted by Roman in his original post, the cloud environment comes with a different layer of interaction. The technological challenges we’ve faced before are already recognized and therefore commodified. Now it’s a question what new projects (or frameworks) we’ll have to solve the new challenges? Or better – as service nature of cloud computing changed the impact of open source, is there any way how to project an open source ideas into the service provisioning as well?
