by Don Park
at 2002/10/21 06:24:07
People
- Andy Hertzfeld - Andy has a great talent for creating innovative and highly polished GUI for consumer software. I can trust him to deliver a GUI that knocks people out.
- John Anderson - Another guy who has proven his talents for building consumer software. His WriteNow was simple and easy to use. I haven't used any of his NeXT applications, but I have heard great things about them.
- Tim O'Reilly - With him on OSAF board, one can expect constant stream of guerilla marketing and publicity from O'Reilly.
OSAF Mission
OSAF's mission is to create and gain wide adoption of Open Source application software of uncompromising quality. PIM is just the first project. What will be next? Which is worse, Microsoft announcing a competing product in the name of profit or OSAF doing the same in the name of community?
OSAF Financing
Mitch Kapor is putting up $5 million of his money. That should be enough for three to four years with a staff of 14, some of them volunteers. Once the first product is released, I am sure donations from box makers will start rolling in. In return, the box makers will ask OSAF to build rest of the Office killer suite so they can ship Linux boxes with application suite of uncompromising quality.
Sense of Value
In countries like Korea, there was no software market because people did not see software as something you pay for. When they bought a PC, it came with every software you will ever need. Office? AutoCAD? dBase? No problem. While much has changed since, software piracy is rampant in Korea because people have no sense of value when it comes to software. If they pay for it, its only because they might get raided.
What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software. If OSAF succeeds, consumers will have access to a wide array of high quality software for free. Most likely, every PC will start to ship with them preloaded. Every time a new OSAF product ships, a market segment will dies. OSAF paints a picture of the future where consumers are expected to pay for contents and services, but software is free.
Path of Destruction
While Mitch may say and believe otherwise, I believe OSAF is a richman's Destructive Crusade against Microsoft's monopoly. At strategic level, I agree with him that there are very few viable options against Office. If the only path with reasonable chance of success leads to destruction of value, a cornerstone of market economy, should you take it? My answer is no. I'll admit that I am not 100% certain what lies at the end of OSAF's road. I'll bet Mitch doesn't know either.
Wishful Thinking?
If I had a magic wand, I would:
- Break up Microsoft into little companies around products.
- Require all file formats to be documented and made public.
- Forbid application bundling by publishers and box makers.
Comments
I gotta admit --
Let's run the argument backwards and see where it leads...giving away software is bad because it destroys the market for software, which is "a cornerstone of market economy" (there's a tautology if I've ever heard one.) So by your logic, we'd be better off if people had to pay for air, because then there'd be a market for it, right?
"What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software. If OSAF succeeds, consumers will have access to a wide array of high quality software for free. Most likely, every PC will start to ship with them preloaded."
Perhaps some of these "market segments" actually deserve to "die".
Did buggy whip makers ask that the government regulate motorcars?
I think you have it wrong. Whenever a Microsoft product ships, a market segment will die. The PIM segment is already dead - the browser segment is dead - the word processing and speadsheet segment is dead. The worst that will happen if OSAF succeeds is that Microsoft will have to improve Outlook. Microsoft is an enormous tax on the business community. What other major segment of the economy has a 50% profit margin. My company just spent a very large sum on renewing Microsoft licenses - it was a big wakeup call - they will not be renewed when they come due in 3 years - we can no longer afford the tax.
Don noted
One more thing: it seems that everytime U.S. workers have seen their jobs threatened by free trade and cheaper Asian/Indian/Mexican workers, they've had similar complaints. But the jobs kept going.
Don is it for free? You assume that since no money changed hands that its fro freee. that is not always true..
* I don't think the OSAF PIM will kill Outlook, because Outlook is already "free" with the purchase of Office. It may kill other PIMs, not that anyone would notice.
Fred, OSAF is non-profit and they are planning to provide source and binary at no charge. I saw nothing in OSAF about offering professional services, just commercial licenses which matters little since they are planning to ship end-user products of quality never seen before in the open source world.
Mark, cheaper labor is quite different from free labor. Also, we haven't seen the last of cheap oversea labor, particularly with China's increasing influence over US economy and ever growing trade imbalance.
Scott, I have my guesses about why Open Office is not halting sales of MS Office, but that is irrelevant for I am not worried about Microsoft. I am worried about software developers who are getting squeezed between Microsoft and free software like Open Office. With Microsoft standing like the Rock of Gibralta on the right and free software wildfire on the left, all the theories in the world will not dispell the descending despair.
Ah, well, I see your point. Between those two, there is not a lot of space to play.
(These comments are really too long, so I posted them on my new weblog,
Wow. Everyone else already said my comments (which I posted over on the FuzzyBlog). I should have read these first.
I think this is a great conversation and I hope it gets amplified in the mainstream or at least the tech press. at the risk of writing a <AOL>me too</;AOL> post, I think the three wishes are well-chosen: I'd promote number 2 to number 1, perhaps making number 1 happen by itself as MSFT feels the pressure to become more nimble. Open file formats would make life a lot easier: I read a piece from Tim O'Reilly where he defends this as "users actually owning their data." What a concept: why can't a word processing document or spreadsheet be as convertible as currency?
Thanks paul. I agree with Tim O'Reilly's argument that since we own the data, reasonable means of access (read documented file format) must be provided. For example, if I buy a book encrypted in format A from company B. If company B croaks or fails to provide software for format A on some new platform C, I have lost access to my property although its still sitting in my computer.
Just to make a new point in the conversation, there may be an America/Europe divide opening up here. Don's comments seem to me unarguable: if there is a choice between a commercial monopoly on the one hand, and a free alternative on the other, there will be no room for the market, and that is a bad thing. But it is not the fault of Mitch Kapor. The market vanished once the monopoly was established. The remedies Don suggests might have restored the market, but the American government, which alone could have enforced them, shied away.
<< Whenever a Microsoft product ships, a market segment will die. The PIM segment is already dead - the browser segment is dead - the word processing and speadsheet segment is dead. >>
But companies and governments outside America have to pay the MS tax too. And there is nothing in European culture to stop, eg the EU from subsidising open source development. Doing so seems to me a prime example of enlightened and far-sighted self-interest. An office suite, pim software, and a browser are by now pretty much as necessary for a modern economy as a road system or functioning telephones.
Well, there is an argument that Microsoft was hugely subsidised by the tax rules which let it use stock options to pay people. I don't want to get to far into that because I have forgotten all the details, having read it on Salon a year or two ago.
I wonder what commercial software creators want to gain. Is the goal to make a "killing," or to make a living writing software? Will innovation stop when this "killing" is not possible? As previously stated, there are examples of companies where software services feed the creation process (apple, MySQL, IBM, Redhat). Does open source prevent others from making money in the software arena? Does Microsoft? I really do look forward to the creation of open idea tools, because it is my belief that technology has hindered many other forms of creativity.
Apologies for coming in late, but this subject has always been intriguing. It strikes me that many in the free software/open source arena believe three things that are, I believe, unsupportable:
I'm also late to the party, and most of my thoughts are reflected above, so I'll keep this short by adding a basic observation or few:
The Open Source people come from the traditional, command-line unix world. They have never had a strong tradition of making user-friendly stuff, and virtually fit every single stereotype about engineer-techie folk being uncreative. Why do we keep thinking that people who have been sitting at text terminals for 30 years and telling frustrated users to "go read the fine manual" will succeed in a GUI-driven, user-centered software industry of the 21st century? As for OpenOffice, there is constant denial that the software has usability problems and false claims that the software is perfectly ready be rolled out into the corporate world. The first step in dealing with the problem is to admit that you have one, and right now, Open Source is full of people who yell "stop spreading microsoft propoganda that our software is hard to use and lacks essential features", no matter how valid the criticism is.When you get down to it, Microsoft doesn't need to kick their ass, because they've constantly done an excellent job of kicking it themselves.
"If the only path with reasonable chance of success leads to destruction of value, a cornerstone of market economy, should you take it? My answer is no."
wgerrard: On innovativeness: To date, most open software appears to be rewrites of existing code.
If the code is free, you can build on it and sell that product. There will always be business for programmers who are willing to do something new.
Dave, see my post on quality and functionality thresholds at:
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Copyright © 2006 Don Park
