111–120 of 257 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For “commoditize your complements” strategy, which was probably popularized by Stratechery but GP found earlier piece by Joel Spolsky about the same idea.
So credit for a phrase? Neither invented the actual strategy.
Two comments: Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed yo…
I think the use of revenue is a little disingenuous. Producing, packing, and shipping a physical copy and marketing on broadcast television were major expenses of the pre-2000 world that they no longer have to the same extent (maybe they still buy TV ads but I haven't seen one in a decade at least, used to be all over the place). If you keep smaller part of $12 or a larger part of $0.99 your revenue could fall with p…
At the start of the decline, there wasn't really a good way to buy music in digital format at all. iTunes launched in its current form in 2003.
The decline between those years was essentially the industry losing $12 sales to $0 sales: either directly to piracy, or to competition for time and attention on the Internet.
Youtube blew even more of a hole in the industry in 2005, replacing purchases with streaming. This plays $0.0006 per stream.
(The corresponding profits graph is really hard to find, which suggests that the data may not be so publicly available?)
I work on an open core business model, and we spend a fair amount of time thinking about ways to prevent third parties from stealing our lunch. CockroachDB has an interesting model, where they've tried to closely couple their open source and premium products. This coupling makes it harder for third parties to build against the open source and even easier for enterprises to use it. Do people here have examples of comp…
But why did Red Hat succeed then? (this is a genuine question, I'd have guessed IBM would re-package RH's products, and Oracle failed with their Unbreakable Linux)
Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much bet…
Steam and the major app stores take 6X that much (30%) just for distribution!
If Unreal is better than Unity, then it seems worth paying for.
Agreed, the dream of a megacap open source company is dead. Mongodb shows this, the Unity fiasco (I'm surprised nobody has put the two together) shows this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18874400 Guys, charge for your work. Don't place the economic value of your company to be ancillary to your product. That just invites another company that has that ancillary as their core competency to come and do it much bet…
> megacap open source company Isn't this by itself an oxymoron? Open source isn't shouldn't be one's marketing stunt to gain attention, if you want to charge your software make it proprietary and charge people for license. Using open source as a last resort bait isn't cool. My only jab at Amazon is that they should give back their code to the community or they need to be forced to do so, not that they can't make mone…
Two comments: Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed yo…
Isn't GPL and AGPL Copyleft another form of mandated inconvenience for companies? Come to think of it, many laws are mandated inconvenience with the stated purpose of correcting for some masked externality.
So what is an "open source VC funded" company doing? Creating complements and selling those. It's just that there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS. It's not a law of nature that e.g. Redhat should be the best people to provide consultancy on RHEL.
The historical record indicates that there are indeed network effects at play with communities of experts. However, the historical record also indicates that such effects on pools of expertise aren't powerful enough to create monopolistic single factions which can lock out all competitors.
every company operating as an "OSS startup" has to know from the start that their software can't be charged for directly.
All money made from open source really comes down to the application of expertise to do things with software. The ultimate question is whether software expertise itself can be commoditized.
(EDIT: Another way to phrase it: Is software an ouroboros? It's a snake eating its own long tail. Software keeps eating itself, but it continues the process by creating sufficient change to allow itself to grow as an industry. As time goes on, there are more experts needed. This then begs the question, "What could possibly cause that to change?")
Two comments: Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed yo…
I realize that the idea of “Commoditizing Your Complements” has gained new life lately on HN, but let’s give credit where it’s due - Joel Spolsky in 2002. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Amazon wants to have an offering in every major database category. Whether you're open source or closed source, it's safe to assume if you get decent marketshare Amazon will come after you.
Even if MongoDB was proprietary Amazon would have built a competitor in this space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"IMHO redhat deserves its money". I agree. But the vast majority of people employ CentOS which is redhats derivative. Oracle engineers work hard on java and deserve their money but the vast majority of people employ OpenJDK which is OracleJDKs derivative.
For a long period of time I regarded Oracle as absolutely undeserving owners of the JDK; they didn't write it, it was bought from Sun, they shipped adware in the installer, tried to sue Android out of existence, and were poor stewards of the language.