Re: good references re. ontologies for S*m*ntic W*b
Joshua,
I agree that open-source software is a major
threat to many business models. Evey innovation
and every new business model is a threat to a lot
of old business models. Welcome to the real world.
In the 1950s, Univac was almost synonymous with
computers. IBM managed to win the monopoly in the
computer business by leveraging their old business
model of making punch-card machines. When I joined
IBM, the old timers told me "Don't look down on
punch cards because they're paying your salary."
Unfortunately, sticking to the punch-card model
for mainframes and to electric typewriters for
offices caused IBM to lag behind other companies
in displays -- even though IBM had delivered
displays with a light pen (a precursor to the mouse)
under government contracts as early as 1960.
In 1981, when IBM Boca Raton (where they made small
systems during the 1970s and 80s) announced a PC
based on the Intel 8088, everybody in IBM Research
groaned at the stupidity. Since 1980, IBM Instruments
Division had been selling a machine based on the
Motorola 68000, which had 16 32-bit registers,
big-endian addressing, and an instruction set that
was close enough to the System/370 that you could
easily modify the compilers to generate Motorola code.
However, the Boca Raton gang thought that the Motorola
machine was too powerful, it was made by a different
division, and it would undercut the small-business
products made at Boca. IBM already had an OS for the
X86 machines that ran the Displaywriters for office
products, so they did not want to make the PC compatible
with the Displaywriter -- because they didn't want to
undercut that business either. So they put out a
brain-dead machine without any operating system.
In any case, the IBM Research guys implemented a very
lovely OS for it in six weeks time. But the Boca guys
didn't want to get into the software business. So they
offered three different OSes for the PC from three outside
companies. Customers had no idea which one to buy so
they took the cheapest -- a version of QDOS (Quick and
Dirty OS), which Bill Gates bought for $50K and sold
to IBM for $1 million.
The Boca Raton guys succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
They not only killed the market for machines from Apple
and Radio Shack, they also killed IBM's 68000 machine,
IBM's Displaywriter (which was made in Lexington), and
various small business machines made in Boca Raton.
Furthermore, by choosing an incompatible OS, they made it
difficult for other IBM divisions to port the Displaywriter
software or the Boca Raton software to run on it. By the
time those divisions started to port their software, other
companies had cornered the market.
All kinds of new business models sprang up. Philippe Kahn
wrote a Pascal compiler for the PC and posted an ad in
Byte magazine offering it for $99. Within a month, he got
10,000 orders, which gave him a million-dollar nest egg
to start a company called Borland. But the killer app
for the PC was a spreadsheet called VisiCalc, which was
later killed by another spreadsheet called Lotus 1-2-3.
JA> For example, what do you think is the biggest barrier
> to people upgrading to Office XP? Is it that Star Office
> is "good enough", or is it that Office 95 is "good enough"?
> The biggest challenge to a company like Microsoft is to
> provide value-add over previous versions of the software.
Absolutely! That is true of every monopoly. That's why
the Big Three automakers in the US designed cars that
would self-destruct in 5 years -- until the Germans and
Japanese started to take over the market.
Back in 1969, a guy from IBM Fishkill had used IBM's new
circuit technology to remap the Model 65 mainframe to
a one-board minicomputer. If IBM had released it in 1970,
they would have wiped out a new minicomputer from Digital
called the PDP 11. However, the IBM marketing geniuses
killed it because they didn't want customers to "trade down"
from their current mainframes to the mini. Instead, they
traded sideways to Digital.
JA> ... (and you have to admit, the OS space is a pretty
> stale problem at this point). It has nothing to do with
> "open source" or "free" -- it is the natural lifecycle
> of a problem space that has been thoroughly beaten to
> death and is no longer very interesting.
I agree. It's time to leave the OS and Office Suites to
commodity software and move on to something new. I'm sure
a lot of old companies will have trouble adjusting, but
that's the way it always has been and always will be.
John Sowa