There has developed a certain way of going around open source-style development in recent years:
If you are a promising coder, you tentatively join the community and debug your mind away until you actually make any impact.
As a proprietary software developer company, you either tap into this amazing thing and buy, say, MySQL for $1bn or try to convince your customers, that in fact, open source is unstable, chaotic and evil.
In which case, there is a third way of understanding open source and that is through service and support companies such as Red Hat, which live off customers lack of resources for in-house IT specialists.
Now, yesterday’s Business Week said that this third perspective is dead, “simply because the code is so sound” and open source is known for being secure and generally brilliant. Author, Stuart Cohen, goes on to claim, that:
Think about [collaborating through open source] like going in with others on a pizza. Too often, businesses need to develop software with the same “ingredients” as everyone else, and this offers no competitive advantage. If everyone wants the same pizza, why not share the cost? And by the way, let’s not just share the cost; let’s make it together so we get it just right and know what we’re getting.
Stuart fails to see the difference here between open source development (baking the pizza) and open source support (delivering the pizza to your door warn and safe), deemed the later obsolete by talking about the quality of parmesan. Hmmm, craving pizza… Anyway, what I believe is likely to change is my original second perspective and that is the ways in which corporations develop software. That is not by acquiring successful open source initiatives, but instead by harnessing them in their existing environment and joining forces with other corporations (and its human capital) to develop sometimes much more expensive than one single company could develop. As the new research says, new version of Linux is likely to be twice as expensive as the development of a new Microsoft OS.
Open source development is here is to stay because it is an efficient, cost-effective and best practice driven mode of production. Open source support is likely to stay here as well, because there is only that far that collaborating companies are willing to go in sharing the innovation with their competitors.
In the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers makes a point worth a while: Despite the global, decentralised, open, versatile, flexibile and profitable virtual factory, that is Cisco, its core capacity to innovate capture emerging market transitions is organised through hierarchical relations from line-level working groups to council, boards and directors. Moreover, its famous acquisition tactic and open source competitions such as i-Prize lead to swift integration of this external talent into core Cisco processes. And only when a potential innovation has been processed through the organisational structures of the come, it is rolled out as a wide-spreading solution for customers and rigid standard for the suppliers.
Notwithstanding the electronic market optimists, this is especially contrary to what Manuel Castells believed in in Internet Galaxy (2001). There he declares Cisco as the prime example of decentralized globally networked virtual factory, yet failing to make a distinction between the networked condition of its manufacturing and customer services process and hierarchy in which the actual Cisco, R&D specialist and IT standards broker, is organised. Good book that Internet Galaxy nevertheless.
It happened that POLIS, LSE media think tank that I spent this spring working for, has released a report on financial journalism and its role in the world of financial services at large. And there were big questions asked at the launch of the report last Monday, such as researcher coordinator Dr Damian Tambini flexing his forehead wrinkles with “What is financial journalism for?” and “Is this the time to abandon self-regulation in favour of ‘new compact’ between journalists and the society?” or, in fact, Prof Ed Wasserman, the American anchor of this research: “What is the difference between deception and distortion?”
To some extent, the research lays out useful and flexibile framework for research in the years to come based on some fairly modest assumptions: a) financial journalists were given privileges (legal, ethical, aesthetic) in order to serve public interest, b) this ‘old’ compact has been broken by the revelation of financial journalists that instead of public, they prefer to serve and inform investors. Moreover c) journalism in general is subjected to five challenges: 1. Speed, 24hr news cycle; 2. complexity of the system, i.e. financial media has actual impact on stock prices; 3. PR effect, with less time to write stories, journalist are not reflexive to corporate PR; 4. Sustainability = new media; 5. Globalisation.
You can read the whole report here and read a bit more about the framework and the road map here - all very interesting and relevant to future financial journalism. Just a brief comment: RE: challenge no. 3 - Financial journalists are part of the financial system itself and they have never fulfilled the public duty in the first place, since their work is more of a sensitive information and trust brokerage than BBC style objective reporting. Unless you play the game like Robert Preston, I guess.
So I learnt that Google and WPP have joined forces to invite proposals from members of academia that would uncover the mystery of online media effects on consumer behaviour and human digital condition. Given the scary shopping list of potential research questions (e.g. How does offline media affect search and vice versa?, How do consumers determine what is relevant?, What do we know and what more do we need to know about on-line audiences?) and allocated budget of £2.95m, the initiative is quite a hesitant push to establish the new paradigm in advertising.
Now as much as it is comfortable, productive, elegant and sometimes smart to work within a stable framework (say Silver Bullet), the aforementioned questions are in fact not to be answered by scientific inquiry - on the contrary, through power struggle. But never mind the puny details of paradigm shifts, the deadline for 3-page proposal submission is December 30, 2008 and there are 12 invitations at stake. Therefore I feel obliged to challenge my estemeed colleagues from LSE and USC to deliver.
Following a year-long break from blogging and generally engaging in online discussions, I have decided to establish - once again - a channel for venting my comments on the things that work my blood pressure and play around with my adrenaline levels. However unlikely, I will write here about my experience as a graduate media student of the LSE with all the privileges of having access to all sorts of fun high profile academic and professional lectures, seminars, talks and critical conversations (coffee and pastry included). I will also cover my experience of being an analyst in social media consultancy in London, where established marketing strategies evaporate on a daily basis to create space for various chaotics assumption striving to become the. next. big. thing. Lastly, being a geek and all, I will reflect on the current trends in the digital market services in general and issues such as agile programming, user interface design and innovation management in particular. Hoping to provide your with semi-daily interesting read, I invite you to comment back on anything you find worth a second thought. Thank you.