Oh, adoption matters.

Zack,

Adoption matters whether it's hardware, software, cars, electricity or lima beans. In all cases, adoption drives economies of scale. In turn, reduction of costs assist in building an ecosystem surrounding the product. But let me stick to software.

Thanks for pointing out Savio's ridiculous rant. The thing that irritates about me about his blog is:
1. Open Source provides that access to source code thing (versus Shareware) which puts the developers in closer contact with users. I think of this, to borrow Simon Phipp's terminology, as user-led innovation. Simon does make this point. But an infinitesimally small number of users also choose to contribute and even innovate. This is one of the reasons behind community growth for open source projects.
2. As the user base grows, the community provides enormous value beyond feedback on product direction. Users, or even VARs, localize projects. With large enough communities, testing and validation surpasses typical beta testing of proprietary software. With the largest projects, like the Linux kernel, innovation happens at a rate not seen in any software project (see Greg Kroah-Hartman's blog: http://www.kroah.com/linux).

In other words, I'm saying adoption matters because of the community's ability to add value. This just doesn't happen, and can't, with Shareware...

Another way of putting it is that an adoption-led model matters most where economies of scale matter most. If I'm selling million dollar software to five customers, who cares about adoption? At that point its all about paying big dollars for high quality elephant hunters. But if my entire business model is built around selling to a HUGE audience, then it's all about the EYEBALLS.

I had the opportunity to catch up recently with an old colleague from Epiphany who is now at the Dublin office of Google. We were sharing notes on how the business models of Google and SugarCRM were so much more similar to each other than compared to yesterday's enterprise CRM software "Armani-wearing" style of Epiphany (err, SSA Global, no I meant Infor).

We talked about how the three most important things in today's world of enterprise software are eyeballs, eyeballs and eyeballs. The metrics I look at every day at Sugar are downloads, installs and live systems.

Commercial open source businesses need mass adoption in order to be successful. But another way of looking at it is that commercial open source can only be successful if mass adoption is possible.