On Jun 19, 10:10 am, Rozzie <rozziewil...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Rex Ballard wrote:
> > The irony is that most of these opportunities were "out in the open".
> > They were based on Open Source technology (linux, dig, crawlers,
> > WAIS...).
>
> So when does the Google boycott start?
Hopefully it wont.
> You Linux users are really a pip.
> Choice is fine as long as it's choices that you like, as Linux users.
> If a particular company or marketing strategy or what ever doesn't fit
> into your concept of Linux Utopia you start the bad press and
> boycott wheels spinning.
I think you missed the point of my posting. Google is a perfect
example of how a good company, with good management, can use OSS
technology to create a business solution that can be very profitable
and very scalable, even before doing an IPO.
Google doesn't even try to claim that they are brilliant innovators.
They provide a really good and popular service, don't charge for
people to submit content, encourage people to put their content into
the database, and offer premium placement for a price. They make sure
that the advertizing is viewed by the people most likely to want to
see it, and as a result, they have a remarkably high ratio of viewers
who follow the advertizer's links.
Furthermore, advertizers know that google is a very good place to
place the "ready to close" advertizements. Viewers often know what
they are looking for, and just need a supplier and a price.
Google is also smart not to try and eat massive amounts of bandwidth.
They keep their displays very simple, with graphics that are static
and easily cached. The result is that Google is often "first choice"
as search engine.
Yahoo also did a great job of turning BSD and other OSS technology
into a profitable business. There are several other companies that
have never gone public, because they don't need to.
> At some point, you will realize that
> this is all about money. Every
> single conglomerate, wealthy backer or
> organisation that gets involved with Linux
> is looking to make a profit.
Absolutely!
Google, Amazon, E-Trade, Yahoo. All great examples of
companies who have created successful business models
in which OSS is a strategic element of their business.
Others, such as Wachovia, WalMart, and Burlington Coat
factory aren't "pure Linux" or even "pure OSS" success
stories, but have demonstrated how Linux and OSS can
provide the strategic "edge" to help them focus their
resources on "bottom line" activities.
> They all start by seeding the community with
> freebies and support, but ultimately they
> will all go commercial in one form or fashion.
Sun is a great example of this. They offer a "free"
(as in beer) version, then they offer the "for fee"
version. Get J2SE for simple applications, but you
have J2EE for the big commercial projects. Get OpenOffice
for the kids' homework, but get StarOffice for the business
correspondence. Get Linux for development, but when you need
a high availability production system for your Enterprise Database,
Solaris runs Oracle or DB2 extremely well.
IBM is also a good OSS and commercial player.
Pick up Eclipse, WebShere Community Edition, and Derby/Cloudscape
for prototyping, training, and development, but when you are
ready to create a production deployment, there is WAS, Rational,
DB2/UDB in Enterprise edition flavors that can be run on AIX, or
Linux Clusters. If you need a more "windows friendly" interface
They can even provide the .NET to SOA integration.
You can build it yourself, or have the consultants build it for you.
You can support it yourself, or have operations outsourced to IBM.
You can host it in your data center, or have IBM host it for you.
But you can test your concept on a Linux VM.
> It's all about money and power and someday,
> history will look back and
> say their is just no stopping capitalism.
Of course not. Nothing wrong with people creating a nice
business based on services created using OSS. Nothing wrong
with using OSS to feed commercial products.
Microsoft is missing the big opportunity. They actually messed
themselves up when they tried to divorce the server from the
workstation. Now, Linux has moved into the desktop because
people can use the desktop to prototype their server based solution.
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