Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 24 Sep 2005 15:39:00 GMT
over at TextDrive they are upset that they can’t renew the urchin data center licence
since the do-no-evil Google bought them, and seemed to have started a Petition/Survey to convince Google that they should continue their current licensing model.
Why should google be forced to continue a product pricing model they don’t agree with. Google is all about running stuff on their infrastructure. Why do they want to maintain a expensive customer service centre and product development staff when they can host it themselves far more cheaply (and also get more of the pie at the same time).
They offer a Urchin subscription model which does just that, but I’m guessing that wouldn’t be cost effective for TextDrive as it charges per domain or something, which gives TextDrive no volume break.
In effect Google/Urchin has decided that it is more profitable for them to sell straight to the customer, instead of going via middlemen like TextDrive. That is what business is all about, and it happens all the time, and why being a middle man for a large corporation is so sucky (if your too profitable you lose your business, when megacorp decides they want a bigger portion of the value chain)
So what can Textdrive do about it?
These are the two options I currently see them doing. I don’t belive either of these will work, or provide the end result they want. (Cheap web stats for their customers which isn’t dependant on the number of domains they host)
Here is what I propose they do.
go find a server-side open source project which does/could do what they need. (go look at Weed for a example).
Take the license fees they would have spent on buying mint/licencing Urchin for say 3 years, and use that to sponsor/fund R&D work on Weed so that it has the desired functionality they need. The accountants will love it, as your are converting an ‘expense’ to a ‘capital expenditure’ which means they can depreciate it over multiple years, instead of just one (meaning higher profits).
If you want this to work even better, you could approach other urchin datacenter licencees and persude them to use 1-2 years worth of expenses to fund R&D on a product which will meet their needs and be opensource/free of licencing fees from then on. The Weed developers would like it, as they could quit their day jobs/get paid to do something they love. And possibly start a support/consulting company around the product they develop which they could offer to other people. (even turning it into a ASP-type service later on and charging people that way)
Now thats the power of opensource development model.
Posted in Business Related | Tags coopetition, mba, opensource | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:34:00 GMT
in Daring Fireball John talks about how google is not a ‘web os’, but a advertising company. Which I agree with, Google’s customers are the advertisers. But in order to grow at a rate they want to, and to protect their core business they need compete against the other search possibilities… which are Yahoo and Microsoft otherwise these companies could out-manuver them and make Google irrelavant in the medium term.
Google competes directly with Microsoft with MSN, MSN-Messenger, and HotMail. The largest threat (IMHO) to MS if Google develops some kind of office lookalike which will start affect sales. If I were Google, I would donate a couple of their staff to work on Star Office to make it a better product. (or fund some of the existing star-office developers to achieve the same thing).
I see the largest threat to Google from Microsoft is Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop. While people currently do searches from their browser and have choice on who they use, imagine if searching was more deeply integrated into the desktop, so that direct searches are no longer done, but they are done indirectly (commoditizing the search so that no one cares which engine serves the results).
Google also indirectly competes with them for staff, they even set up an office in Seattle to attract the softies over. How can you develop the next big thing if you don’t have the rocket scientists building it?
So this is why Google is offering more things that Yahoo and Microsoft currently do, and will continue to do so, and why Yahoo and Microsoft will continue to try and improve their search, as well trying to make it more of a commodity at the same time.
Personally I hope all three of them keep each other in check all releasing brilliant things and giving me the surfer more choices, and my work the content-provider more traffic. I think the worst possible outcome is if we have a winner, as it would mean less innovation overall.
Posted in General | Tags coopetition, google, microsoft, yahoo | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 02 Sep 2005 03:15:00 GMT
Matthew over at the The Silent Penguin says that IT purchasers don’t like choice when they have to choose enterprise systems, and goes on about co-operation between open source projects.
While I agree projects should co-operate and have common standards, having multiple projects being developed is not a bad thing.
Every implementation of a given spec is made up of choices. Should we concentrate on following the spec to the letter, or performance. Should we design it this way or that. There is no correct choice here, and there is no one ‘perfect’ implementation which will fit everyone’s needs, as people’s needs are different.
So I would encourage mutliple ESB projects, each take a different tack, and each ‘borrowing’ the best ideas of each others implementations if they choose to, and focusing on interoperability with each other.
Diversity and cross-pollination builds strength.
What makes me upset about having 3 open source projects is that the people involved in the project are not borrowing and cross pollinating. They are pointing fingers and bickering, in public, and in private between themselves.
What needs to be done is for all the projects involved have a ‘joint task force’ or something where lead developers can talk in a open and frank manner so that the implementations can leverage the experience and talent which every group has.
Open source projects need to stop acting like commerical projects. Coopetition not competition should be what open source projects should be talking about. If ESB gains traction the space is big enough to support 3 (and possibly more) open source implementations with ease.
ESB will not gain traction while you are fighting with each other, and in the end you will all lose.
Posted in Business Related | Tags competition, coopetition, opensource | no comments | no trackbacks