The End Of the Software Business As We Know It?

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=2882

What I Learned on Linux Lunacy - Doc Searls
by Julian Bond on 01/11/02 - 12:24  Julian Bond's blog | 1 comment

Interesting short article from Doc Searls "What I Learned on Linux Lunacy."
Among other things, Doc is a journalist for Linux Today so he's not exactly
a disinterested observer. The report is about a cruise of the Caribbean for
the alpha geeks of the Linux community.

What caught my eye was this piece. "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."

Now I made a fair bit of money in the early 90s running a software company
so I'm quite sad to see this if it's true. And it's an issue I've thought
long and hard about since then as I tried to work out how to repeat it. I
have to say I think I agree with him. Linux in particular seems to me to be
the TCP/IP of operating systems (in the same sense that Football is the
TCP/IP of team sports). The entry price is low, it's "good enough", it has
relatively low hardware requirements and almost surprisingly there seems to
be no limit on it's scalability at the top end. As Linux spreads outwards
displacing proprietary OS at the top, other Unix in the middle and Microsoft
/ Apple at the low end, you have to wonder where it will end. Will we be
looking back in 10 years time complaining that despite the fact that Linux
is ubiquitous and gets the job done, it's still rubbish and limiting where
we go next?