What is the ASF's competitive advantage?
Posted by Ian Holsman
competitive advantage is a term often bandied about by wonks, but people usually misuse the term. In order to be defined as a ‘competitive advantage’ it has to be:
1. competitive. it has to be a skill that is critical to the success of your business. (two questions to ask, and a ‘YES’ in either is what you are after:
- does it ‘add’ value to your offering. (do the customer value it more)
- and can you ‘capture’ that. (get that extra value into your hands, and not other peoples)
2. An advantage. it has to be hard to duplicate by other groups outside of your organization. either for a period of time, or ideally forever.
(value is not necessarily cash, by value here I define it as happiness to the ASF members)
The experts (i.e.. the academics ) state that any organization usually has one or two of them tops, and that there are two main different types of competitive advantage:
- structural based, where the industry it is in gives it a natural advantage via owning a key resource, or the network effects surrounding it make it hard to displace (like myspace or linkedin for example.. while there are competitors out there they find it hard to make a dent, or how Walmart opens a large store in a town which is only capable of supporting one store of that type in it’s area)
- capabilities based, where a org is just better at doing something than someone else. This can also be seen when their internal processes are just so integrated together that it makes it next to impossible for another company to duplicate successfully (southwest airlines is the perfect example here, lots of other airlines try to copy parts of it’s process, but fail as the can’t copy ALL of it)
so.. back to the title of the post. What does the ASF do which is better than any other group.
I’m going to have a stab at some which I hear often. not all of them are competitive advantages by themselves, as others can duplicate them, but the combination is the hard thing to duplicate. (ie the combination is the competitive advantage, not any one of them)
- industry acceptance. both by the orgs who use our product, but also by the orgs who let their staff contribute back. Getting a lawyer from IBM or Sun to allow this is no easy task, those CCLA’s we hold are valuable.
- smart and engaged people. we’re not the only group with smart people, the trick is how to keep the ones we have engaged, and how to cross-polinate these people from different backgrounds into other ASF projects.
- diversity. while it’s like herding cats sometimes, the diversity brings unique insights and strengths to bear on given issues. The diversity also comes from our members being part of other open source communities.
- communities – these are our recruiting and sales/marketing pools so to speak. we actively recruit our users to become members. Unlike a traditional job interview we deal with known resources. We know who we are going into bed with so to speak, as do our customers.
- partnerships – The ASF is only a small cog in the entire open source world. Members in the ASF also participate in other open source organizations.
The aim of the ASF (as I see it) is NOT to be the biggest open source org, or to have the most members/projects under it’s belt.
Officially it is to provide organizational, legal, and financial support to the projects under it’s umbrella. but I see it more as a way for the members to enjoy themselves doing what they love doing.