Hi, Sorry for not snipping, but I wanted to be able to preserve the full context.
On Wednesday 23 March 2005 08:26, Chuck wrote: > Lars D. Noodén wrote: > > OOo and OpenDocument both get a mention towards the middle of > > the article: > > > > Nigel McFarlane. "Firefox explorers." The Age. 22 Mar 2005. > > > > http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/03/21/1111253920087.html > >?oneclick=true > > > > > > ... "I'm staggered and close to offended that some > > businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm > > staggered by the timidity of some IT managers," he says. > > I think the problem is that nobody wants to be the manager who > recommended software that was later found out to have some > incompatibility with MS file formats, the format that 98% of the > rest of the business world uses. This story reflects what Bhaskar Chakravorti calls "demi-Moore's law." For those of you who like Clayton Christensen, you will also be interested in Chakravorti's book, "The Slow Pace of Fast Change". Basically Chakravorti unpacks the chicken-and-egg problem of how to get a new innovation like OOo into a highly networked market like the software market. Basically, demi-Moore's law says that technology will be adopted at somewhat less than the pace of innovation, in part, because demand and supply side players hang back to see which way competitive battles will play out, and then everyone jumps on board when it becomes apparent which way the shift is going to lean. It's what Chakravorti calls the "inefficiencies of networked economies." Here is a link for Chakravorti's book: http://www.slowpacefastchange.com/ To me and our film, "The Digital Tipping Point," the interesting thing is the time of approaching the point where demi-Moore's law runs in reverse. To me, that is why we will see a rather dramatic tipping point in the adoption of GNU/Linux and OOo and other free open source software projects. At some point, there are going to be enough major demand side players and supply side players who are using OOo that demi-Moore's law will run in reverse, and the inefficiencies of the networked software market will start to run in FAVOR of OOo, and AGAINST Microsoft! So Chakravorti works well with Christensen's team because Christensen's team explains the MOTIVATION for individual overshot customers to adopt FLOSS; and Chakravorti gives us sort of a fly-over shot of which way demi-Moore's law is running, and how fast. Another interesting thing about this demi-Moore's law is that it helps you (or at least me) think of how to when the digital tipping point might arrive, using tide flows as an analogy. Here in San Francisco, we have huge tide changes. The whole huge San Francisco Bay flows out through the relatively narrow Golden Gate which is spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes when the tide change is really big, say an eight foot (2.5 meter) difference, you can almost feel slackwater approaching. A big tide change means that all the water that wanted to rush out of the Bay now wants to rush back in. So at the height of the on-coming tide, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, you can look down from the Bridge and see the water flowing rapidly into the Bay, like some raging river almost. As slackwater approaches, you can feel the river slow down, and then there is a curious bit of time where the Bay is still at the height of slackwater. Then, several hours later, the river is flowing back out to the Pacific Ocean, once again at a surprisingly quick clip for such a large body of water. Major ocean liners will time their arrival into the bay to coincide with an in-coming tide, rather than risk the fuel and rocks at the mouth of the bay in the fury of the out-going tide. I'm a lawyer, and have been working in the law in once capacity or another since 1985, and I remember when the tide of demi-Moore's law switched against WordPerfect and in favor of Microsoft Word. It seemed that OVERNIGHT most users, and even most law firms, switched en masse from WP to Word. I was shocked, because I thought (and still think) that WP was vastly superior to Word. But Word was a disruptive technology for WP, and a sustaining technology for Microsoft. Word was more convenient to acquire and use. This was a classic example of demi-Moore's law and disruption acting in concert. Word came easily pre-packaged in many cases with Windows (ease of acquisition) and Word was more easy to use than WordPerfect (mostly because Microsoft broke WordPerfect on Windows). Microsoft had connections in its Windows OEM distribution channel (ease of acquisition) that WP could not match, and so it was able to "incent" key supply-side players into cooperating. Before Microsoft used its lock-in power, no supply-side player could touch WordPerfect, the unquestioned market leader. IMHO, the same thing is going to happen to OOo and Word. Obviously, the difference is that currently, there is no single player in the OOo drama that has the muscle that Microsoft quickly acquired in the WordPerfect drama; and there probably never will be a similar single player due to the open, competitive nature of the software libre market. But there are several very slick supply-side players in the software libre market. Sun, Linspire, Novell and HP really "get" it that 5 billion people live in markets where Microsoft is entirely too expensive, and where Microsoft has little or no viable business model. Currently, Microsoft's solution is to try to "buy" the market by "lobbying" (bribing) local officials, giving its software to some libraries and schools, and offering package deals to governments like Thailand. But that is not a sustainable business model for a company whose revenue is primarily derived from the SALES of the software itself! Windows and Microsoft Office are becoming commodities, and it is difficult to base a market-leader on the sales of low-margin commodities. Linspire, Novell, and HP are able to make decent margins, at least theoretically, by selling the service of repackaging (Linspire and Novell) or by selling hardware (Novell, Sun, HP) or by making deals with hardware providers in emerging markets (Linspire). Each of those companies are also doing a good job of establishing distribution channels in emerging markets without having to "buy" the market, like Microsoft is doing. So IMHO, those companies are more well poised to grow with those emerging markets than is Microsoft. As a side note, I have interviewed Michael Robertson, the CEO of Linspire, for the Digital Tipping Point film, and you'd better believe that this guy "gets" Clayton Christensen. He founded MP3.com, and MP3.com is now the number TWO most linked site ON THE PLANET!!! Yep, MP3.com is actually more linked than any other site, except Yahoo. That really has to make you think. MP3.com is more linked than Expedia, or Microsoft, or Amazon or AOL or the US White House!! Look at what MP3 did to the music industry, and MP3 is a classic disruptive technology, and MP3's effects on the music industry are ONLY BEGINNING. This history has gotta make you see Linux, open source, Linspire, and Michael Roberston in a whole new light. http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/plapp/publinkpop.dll/BuildChart > > I have OOo installed on my laptop and love it (don't tell my > workstation support group though or they'll remove it as > "unsupported software"). When I buy my new XP home PC this week, > OOo will be installed and not MS or Corel. But I wouldn't dare > save a shared document at work with it. I haven't come across > file format problems yet but I don't want to be the one > responsible for corrupting a file that 20 other people are using > and have to explain why I was using OOo instead of Word or Excel > to my boss. See, your choice is largely dictated by your expectations of other players in the market, exactly as Chakravorti describes. Again, it's an illustration of "demi-Moore's law". There are already entire generations of kids in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who are learning to use *only* OOo, because their ONLY access to computers is through the computer centers built by the Sao Paulo government, and we filmed those centers, and those centers use ONLY software libre (or software "livre" in Portuguese). Same thing for ALL of the schools in Extremadura, Spain, and soon will be the same in Catalonia and Valencia and Andalucia. Same thing for Riverdale High School, in Portland, Oregon. IMHO, the day is only about 3 years away when people will wonder why they ever paid for an office suite, just the way that people now wonder why they ever paid for a browser. (I actually paid for Netscape, twice!) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
