I wrote an article yesterday comparing proprietary software vendors to the shadow-watchers in Plato's "Allegory of the Cave." Thinking through the idea further, I'm increasingly convinced that we are at a critical juncture in the evolution of the software industry. Mike Olson (Sleepycat, now Oracle) and I will be debating this at O'Reilly's upcoming Executive Radar at OSCON. Should be fun, though I'm sure we'll each try to paint the other as Cro-Mag. :-)
The industry is clearly moving toward service-based software models. Open source, enterprise SaaS (e.g., Salesforce.com"), consumer/Internet SaaS (e.g., Google, Digg, Yahoo!, etc.), etc. are tangible examples of the move away from "tangible" licenses to lock-in value and lock-out competition. The old world is fading, though it will take a long time for it to fade to the point of irrelevance, as Savio is fond of pointing out.
My (fool's) hope is that as we move out of the world of proprietary license competition the level of competition will become both more fierce and collegial, because it will be more focused on serving customer needs and less on clubbing competitors. But that's my naive hope, and I'm not expecting us to move out of a Hobbesian existence anytime soon.
It's time to evolve. There are better models available for serving customer needs than our Neanderthal proprietary past. It's not that this model is bad in some religious sense. But it is bad in how it treats the customer (as a would-be criminal who will steal value if she can). And it is bad in its inefficiency (expensive sales and marketing costs, higher than necessary development costs because it reserves all development - even tertiary development like language backs and "last-mile" configuration/customization, etc.).
We can do better. We should do better. And, regardless of the old guard's protestations, we will do better. (To that point, it's fascinating to watch the old guard experiment with open source. Some are doing highly interesting things with open source, as I'll be highlighting this coming week.)
Open source is an unstoppable force at this point.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 24, 2007 07:15 AM
