

Giving Shit Away is not a Business Strategy - Anon84
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/12/GivingShtAwayIsNotABusinessStrategy.aspx

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SingAlong
Yeah! The author is damn right about Google. Until I read this post I was a
diehard G fan. Anything G was cool to me. It just took me a few seconds to
realize the situation. Most who hate Microsoft's expensive products say that
they like Google since its more open. Many ditch MS products and go for
Google's. Even I ditched MS office and use Google Docs. But only now realize
that I am becoming increasingly dependant on Google. I accept that they build
really cool and simple products. But every cool G prod seems to come with an
visibly invisible string. Example: they introduced appengine. And they have a
Users API which makes a devs job easy but it only works with G accounts. So if
u want to have your own accounts system, you have to build it yourself. If
Google was really open, they would have had a 'more' general Users API, or
atleast the current one with the option of OpenID.

They make their buck when you read a mail in the inbox. And most feel that the
strip on top of the inbox is to show news. Well how many times do u see news?
I often see 'sponsored link'.

Their vision of "making everything web-based" means what it reads to us. But
to G it means having a Google Accounts login for everything and then making
money from the ads or using the userdata as stats to build more prods with the
G login.

Why talk about open-Bigtable or open-Google Docs? They haven't even made the
WYSIWYG editor that's used in Gmail as Opensource. They build most of their
apps by modding some other opensource software. Google Mashup Editor uses
Codepress. Google Video Player was built on VLC media player.

We fail to understand that Google is like any other company(infact a worse
demon). The only difference is that they try to slit your throat politely
instead of rudely slaughtering you with ads. I am shifting to OpenOffice. :)

Atleast MS and Apple are being honest and gutsy by 'selling' their
software/hardware without much visibly 'invisible' strings like having you to
login to Windows with your LiveID or having to use sync an iPhone with Mac OS
only or even worse... restricting calls by allowing only iphone-to-iphone
calls.

Now its a serious 'Hero Wanted!!!' situation. We need someone who can stop G's
monopoly game, a MS-Y! combo will not do much damage to G! And the hero to
crush G will have to do it for everyone's good and not to start his monopoly.

One simple and collective method of doing it is mass adoption of OpenID. We
have OpenID sites. But they have alternative login. Getting OpenID into
mainstream as the 'only' login system for most sites. My pledge: my next site
will use OpenID.

~~~
pmorici
"They haven't even made the WYSIWYG editor that's used in Gmail as
Opensource."

There is a WYSIWYG editor included as part of Google Web Toolkit, which is
released as open source. I don't know if it is the exact same one as in Gmail
but it does the job.

I would also say that my distaste for MS products doesn't really have anything
to do with them being closed source. It has to do with the fact that Microsoft
documentation is super crappy and it makes their stuff a pain to work with.
Where as the GNU/Linux man pages are very well written and easy to get the
information you need.

~~~
SingAlong
U've got a point there.

Extensive customisability is also confusing. Linux distros are great(i started
running slackware to get rid of the virus problems that I had on windows). For
non-superuser distros, the developer should remove the extensive
customisability. The desktop environment for example, u get a lot options from
fluxbox to kde to TabWindow Manager. Those kind of too confusing options
should be removed in non-superuser distros. The procedure of installation of
additional software, windows wins hands down. There aren't too many types. All
a user has to do is to click on the setup file of most software. In linux, if
a distro doesn't have a package manager, then learning how to install
different packages from rpms to tar.gz to whatever, takes time. And even
worse, some apps come with the tag "compile it yourself".

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scorpioxy
This is depressing. The author doesn't seem to understand that free software
and/or open source software does not mean no price.

Sometimes, release software under a free license does make a lot of business
sense. Sun is a hardware company, and by releasing some of their software
under a free license, they are hoping for more developers to adopt their
platforms.

Remember the "developers, developers, developers"...Microsoft is trying to do
the same thing. The express editions of visual studio, which are proprietary,
are meant to do that. I would expect an MS employee to know that.

Now whether any of these companies succeed in increasing adoption by releasing
software under an open license depends entirely on how good a job they do.

~~~
pragmatic
The difference is SUN doesn't have a business model anymore. Hardware is now a
commodity. What business do you want to be in? One where the price of your
product has to decrease (and every tech web site is trumpeting the benefits of
cheap commodity hardware) OR the one where you can charge MORE each year for a
little bit different version of your software (and you have a built in
monopoly (like Microsoft and Google)?

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raganwald
While I am bearish on SUN oops, JAVA, try to imagine what would have happened
if Sun hadn't realeased Java for free. I suggest that the Internet boom would
have created three families of tools fo rbuilding web applications:

Scripting (Perl, PHP, &c.), C++, and Microsoft.

Which one do you think most corporations would be using?

I agree that giving shit away isn't a source of revenue, but it can be a good
way to play defense. In Sun's case, Java seriously hampered Microsoft's vision
of the Internet future. If there was no Java, I believe Sun wouldn't exist
today, because Microsoft would have taken 100% of the market for corporations
creating public-facing web applications.

Sure, Sun's in rough shape. But at least they have a chance.

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mynameishere
Giving things away can make sense. Microsoft gives away compilers and crippled
versions of Visual Studio, but such things help sell Windows. Sun giving the
world a set of platform-independent dev tools doesn't exactly encourage people
to buy _their_ platform.

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mingyeow
excellent excellent article.

dare has a fantastic way of deciphering through any amount of hype, and
talking about the real situation!

