Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Proprietary innovation is dead...?

September 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Proprietary innovation is dead...?

TAGS: Open Source

People are fond of deprecating open source for not producing a few zillion jackpots. The problem with that line of thinking is that it presupposes there have been a lot of proprietary hits. There haven't, as the link above notes. There aren't that many $1 billion-plus software companies.

And there aren't likely to be many more, as Dana Blankenhorn rightly notes today.

Back in the 20th century it was easy to find proprietary start-ups. They were all over the PC space, the network space, the database space, and the enterprise space. They promised great things a year from now, and sometimes delivered.

Where are they now? Some survivors are doing OK, but where are the new proprietary vendors? And when was the last time you got excited about a new proprietary product? Is Vista exciting? The new Office? Or do you read stories about these products with dread, fearful of bugs, viruses, and costs, wondering if it's all worthwhile?

What I have been told is that very few proprietary start-ups exist. Open source creates too much momentum too quickly for most proprietary start-ups to compete. The strategy, even for firms with proprietary code, is to push out some code as open source, try to set a standard, and then hold back something better for those with more money than time.

Now, to be fair to the proprietary software-challenged people reading this, there is fertile ground for the "That's MY toy!!" proprietary software people out there. It's called Web 2.0, which is nothing more than the proprietary world borrowing a bunch of free software so that it can write "the last mile" of software (all of which is proprietary).

But even these startups can hardly avoid open source. At some point, open source became the new normal, and proprietary became anomalous. There is very little activity around pure proprietary software, as Dana notes. The best the proprietary world can manage is mutt-ugly code architecture that heavily relies on open source to provide the mission critical backbone while proprietary fluff rides on top.

It's just a phase the kids are going through, though. They'll eventually learn to open everything. Everyone grows up at some point.

Posted by Matt Asay on September 5, 2006 09:38 AM

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