This guy is on to something!

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Gene Gaines <gene.gaines () gainesgroup com>
Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2002 04:02:24 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: <[Am-info]> This guy is on to something!

Dave,

Perhaps Computer Science is not dead, you just have
to look for it in the right places.  The article cited
below gives me the best feeling I have had about
computing in some time.

Gene
gene.gaines () gainesgroup com

On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, 9:37:09 PM, Fred wrote:

> From: "Fred A. Miller" <fmiller () lightlink com>
> To: "am-info" <am-info () venice essential org>
> Subject: <[Am-info]> This guy is on to something!
> Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 21:37:09 -0500


> What I Learned on Linux Lunacy

> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6414

-- 


------ End of Forwarded Message

The people and ideas on last week's Linux Lunacy cruise confirmed what the
next big story is going to be.

Editors' Note: The following is this week's issue of SuitWatch, senior
editor Doc Searls's biweekly newsletter about business and Linux. Subscribe
to SuitWatch here. 

So how many of you guys got to dine with Linus and his family every night
last week? Not that it matters (and it doesn't), but that's what I did,
among other things, on our second annual Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, which
returned to port in Ft. Lauderdale this past Sunday.

I had high expectations for the trip, and all of them were exceeded. I won't
go into the details of what went on; see the Linux Journal web site on
Friday for a nice long report. But I will give you a brief summary of what
became a lot clearer to me--and to everybody else, I think--by the end of a
week on a ship with Linus, Guido van Rossum, Eric Raymond, Ted Ts'o, Randall
Schwartz, Steve Oualline and a star chamber of other alpha geeks. The short
of it is Linux is an even bigger phenomenon than it appears to be, and so is
the open-source development model that produced it.

There is something a little bit surreal about sitting in a meeting of the
Jamaica Linux Users Group (JaLUG), in a cafe beside a waterfall--with Linus,
Ted, Eric and other luminaries in the front of the room and an attentive
audience filling the rest of the space--while a veteran local IBM executive
stands up and describes the adoption of Linux by the company's customers
with adjectives like "huge".

I'll confess to something here: for the last year or more, I've been a bit
worried that Linux' quiet success threatened to make its story less
interesting. Now I'm convinced there's a new story in the works--a much
bigger one, at least for those of us called "suits" (like, say, the IBM
guy). It's about the end of the software business as we know it, and the
beginning of whatever replaces it.

The business we knew wanted software to be expensive, high margin stuff. It
wanted to lock customers into dependencies. And it wanted to hold on to its
position as the paradigmatic hot business category, the kind of business
high-rolling investors would help drive to huge successes in the stock
market. 

That's over, and it's not because a pile of overfunded dot-com fantasies
crashed to the ground. It's over because the market doesn't want it any
more. The market wants something more like professional
services--architects, designers and builders. Good businesses all, but not
the kind that are "venture scale", as they say.

The market wants generic $200 workstations that run generic operating
systems and generic productivity applications. They don't want to pay more
for the applications than they do for the workstations. In fact, they don't
want to pay for anything other than expertise. And they don't want that
expertise tied up in stuff that nobody else is in a position to understand.

Obscurities are out. We don't want it from our suppliers, our accountants,
our architects, our builders or our building materials. We want it least of
all from suppliers of stuff on which our business lives depend. Expensive
opaque operating systems, no matter how popular they currently remain, are
on a terminal track. Transparent generica is what we're using to build
infrastructure today. We've got that with the Net, we're getting it from
Linux, and we'll get it from our productivity applications too.

There will still be room for plenty of commercial activity in the software
business. But the force of commoditization is going to bring the big
franchises down, simple as that.

The latest evidence comes from one of the founding successes of the
productivity software business: Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus (and later the
cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among other good things).
This past week Mitch's new project, the Open Source Applications Foundation,
made its debut. Its first goal: to fill in a blank in the roster of
productivity generica, with a new personal information manager--code name,
Chandler. 

I just got off the phone with Mitch a few minutes ago. When I asked him
about what inspired OSAF, he named (what else?) Linux. "Linux is a huge
inspiration", he said. When I asked him why, he replied, with sarcastic
humor, "One could hardly fail to notice Linux."

But Mitch didn't think about acting on what he noticed until a mutual friend
introduced him to Linus and the two had lunch. "It was pretty darn
inspiring", Mitch says.


When you think about it, and put a business hat on, the idea that Linux
could start as this little hobby project that would in the course of less
than a decade become this extremely popular piece of software that people
would bet on for mission critical applications...how did that happen? Nobody
is in charge of it. Nobody owns it. It's not controlled by a corporation. It
fundamentally depends on cooperation and collaboration.... It's an amazing
model of how to get stuff done. And very inspiring. It provided a clue to me
about how I was going to get back into software.

Mitch went on to talk about breaking market inertia. Although OSAF is a
nonprofit organization, Mitch makes it clear that OSAF is a bet on the
marketplace. It's an expression of faith that productivity applications is
an area where little if any money is left to be made. But it's also an area
where a lot more business could happen if somebody bothered to finish
building out the basics. That's why he's back.

So on this Halloween, we've got something going here that's more than a big
BOO to Microsoft. It's a loud and clear message for the software industry to
find new ways to make money. I think there are plenty of those. But we won't
begin to see them until we face the facts about productivity desktop
applications. 

Doc Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal. 

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