Re: [ox-en] Re: herrschaft
- From: Felix Stalder <felix openflows.org>
- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 16:51:49 +0100
In June 2002, Joel Spolsky wrote an article about this issue, available in
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
He basically brings up the issue of "complement products". A car maker
would like gas to be cheap, because customers would have more money to
spend on cars, and would use their cars more - bringing more business for
the car makers. Similarly, a company (like IBM) that sells computer
hardware, computer setups and services would like the things it doesn't
supply - like operating system software - to be commodities, very cheap
commodities if possible (and $0 is the cheapest you can get).
Spolsky has a few other interesting insights in his article. For example,
just like system makers want to commoditize the operating system market,
so does Microsoft (as an operating system maker) want to commoditize the PC
market. And that is exactly what happened.
It strikes me that the issue is a bit more complex, and interesting. After
all, IBM is investing quite a bit in developing Open Source Software,
including stuff that will later be included in every version of Linux (hence
the attack by SCO) such as the new kernel. From IBM's point of view, I don't
think the main, or only issue, is costs. Also important is the fact that they
can tweak the code in any way they like, something that just couldn't do with
MS code, not even with the gratis IE.
In the same vein, what the 'public' gets back is not just a free product
available as long as the company supplies it, but a based on which other
communities, say Debian, can organize themselves that are entirely
independent from IBM.
So, perhaps, IBM wants to eat Microsoft's lunch, but from a social point of
view, because Free Software is involved, it's quite a bit more interesting
than the Netscape/IE battles back in the day, which, really, only mattered to
investors.
Felix
----+-------+---------+---
http://felix.openflows.org
_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/