I've been watching the ruminations surrounding Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss with lively interest. Most of the past 5-10 years have been spent wondering how to beat Microsoft. Now, it seems, the struggle is to beat Red Hat...
...and it hasn't even won yet. :-)
It is testament to Red Hat's success that the Financial Times reports that Oracle has considered buying Novell. Stephe rightly points out that Oracle is not a middleware provider, per se, and so should not feel overly threatened by Red Hat's acquisition. Yet it clearly does.
Why? Because there's nothing more terrifying to a closed-source vendor, no matter where it sits in the software stack, than an aggressive, hungry, and successful open source player. Success with JBoss today should lead Red Hat to open up other areas of the stack tomorrow (or, I should say, tightly knit together other open components of the software stack into its own certified offering). Red Hat is not an applications company today, but why not tomorrow?
This is why Oracle, Novell, and others need to quickly learn how to compete in an open world. As I blogged recently, hybrid models are a short-term salve, but they don't effectively beat either closed or open source competitors.
So, it's great that Novell has announced an open source collaboration suite. However, to compete effectively against Microsoft's own Sharepoint + Exchange/Outlook + Office/etc. suite, Novell needs to engage in asymmetric competition: disrupt its proprietary competition by offering a truly open product. Novell's "open" collaboration suite should be...open. Of course, it's easier to say "open" than to actually open up GroupWise/etc. after years of their being closed. But third-party components tied into the suite should be open source, or there's simply no compelling reason to choose Novell over proprietary (or open source) competitors.
The software market will not be won in a day. Companies that take a long-term, open source approach to winning will dominate the next few decades of software. To Oracle, Novell, and others who want to put together compelling "stack" alternatives to Microsoft et al., I have one word:
Open.
If you don't, it's only a matter of time before the open source ecosystem combines in various guises to crush you. Today it's just Red Hat + JBoss. Tomorrow it's Red Hat + JBoss + MySQL, or MySQL + Google, or Alfresco + Compiere, or...you get the picture. The future is open, and your business is closed unless you are, too.
Posted by Matt Asay on April 25, 2006 05:20 AM
