Section 8.6. Conclusion


8.6. Conclusion

Businesses are often much more than simply hardware companies or a software companies or a service providers, offering breadth of product and service in overall value proposition to their customers. Successful companies use a collection of strategies to deliver a "whole product offering" for their customers, driving their core revenue generator with a host of complementing products and services.

Standards have traditionally been one tactic or tool for driving additional complement value to a customer by developing a complement space in a maturing market with a lot of implementations at a reduced price.

Open source software can also be used as a tool to develop a complement space that supports a core revenue product or service. The open source project can act as a quick and convenient bucket of technology around which other product offerings are wrapped, or plugged into an existing product offering network.

A number of models were presented on how to think about customer-centric solution networks and vendor-centric product networks (and for thinking about the product network from a core-complement point of view), alongside Moore's traditional Technology Adoption Life Cycle and Christensen's models for how product markets behave. Open source software projects and standardization efforts can be viewed as tools to be used to attain competitive advantage. A number of large corporations are now participating in OSS communities to the benefit of the corporation and the communities, just as corporations have historically driven voluntary standards engagements. The model-based view certainly doesn't take away from the excitement inherent in different OSS projects or the overall economic value of a successful standard. It merely provides context to businesses that want to understand how to adopt and participate in either.



Open Sources 2.0
Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution
ISBN: 0596008023
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 217

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