Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 23, 2004 10:23 PM
W.R.T. Economic theory: Microsoft, Sun and a few others see their software business model "going commodity". For the rest of us, the actual developers who produce this stuff every day, software development has essentially always been a service. The developer writes software, gets a salary, the company uses the software. A small fraction of the software development in this economy is done to produce a software product.
IBM, DEC, DG, HP, Unisys, Burroughs, Interdata, SGI, Cray, Microdata, Xerox, AT&T and many many other companies all wrote their own operating systems from scratch. Some, like IBM, saw the writing on the wall and simply embraced the new approach. (I remember when IBM was the big bad monopolist, with their mainframes and lock-in O.S. and system services and extremely threatening marketing. I believe they saw a competent O.S. that allowed them to concentrate on other ways of making money, and jumped on it.) Lots of application developers are still building lots of applications, using slick new technologies, just as they always have. But the concept of a manufacturer of systems (both hardware and softare) was an anachronism 10 years ago, and the idea of software-as-product (read proprietary) is becoming an anachronism now, simply following a well-established tradition. The arrival of inexpensive hardware to serve as a development environment has accelerated the trend.
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Commoditization? Only for a few.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 23, 2004 10:23 PMIBM, DEC, DG, HP, Unisys, Burroughs, Interdata, SGI, Cray, Microdata, Xerox, AT&T and many many other companies all wrote their own operating systems from scratch. Some, like IBM, saw the writing on the wall and simply embraced the new approach. (I remember when IBM was the big bad monopolist, with their mainframes and lock-in O.S. and system services and extremely threatening marketing. I believe they saw a competent O.S. that allowed them to concentrate on other ways of making money, and jumped on it.) Lots of application developers are still building lots of applications, using slick new technologies, just as they always have. But the concept of a manufacturer of systems (both hardware and softare) was an anachronism 10 years ago, and the idea of software-as-product (read proprietary) is becoming an anachronism now, simply following a well-established tradition. The arrival of inexpensive hardware to serve as a development environment has accelerated the trend.
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