Only few years ago when a technological company was lagging behind in a new niche that was turned into a mainstream, it had a magic move: creating a new standard.
Standard: The Magic Touch
Many times the standard technology was less efficient, less robust and with less users than the technology that was advanced by the market leader. Yet, it had a magic charm: it was open, and most the players in the market could use it without royalties or other fees. That was including #2, #3 in the market as well as many other giants that were not focused in that market, but had to integrate and expand their product support to that technology.
It worked for DEC with Ethernet (vs. IBM's Token Ring); it was great for NetApp that chose iSCSI with 3% market share vs. EMC leading Fiber Channel protocol and it was like a charm for a small silicon valley firm named CISCO that chosen IP.
How do you Standardize Software?
Let say you are a software company that is lagging behind. Anyone said Yahoo! vs. Google in the internet market? Yahoo! had a great idea to scale out using a BigTable like product, but had no deep pockets for that.
Another example? Facebook? What if you had the largest image store publicly available, yet you have only few hundred developers and you need a new scalable database. What do you do?
Open: The New Magic Touch
Well, both Yahoo! and Facebook chose Open Source their infrastructure products creating two of the leading infrastructure products in todays world: Apache Hadoop and Apache Cassandra.
And Cloud, What about the Cloud?
Well it seems that last week Rackspace move: establishing OpenStack.org and contributing major parts of its propriety cloud infrastructure code to this project, is a clear say that being #2 in the IaaS market (see Jack of all Clouds latest report) that is being invaded by major players such as VMware, Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft is not an easy task even to such a major player in the old hosting business. (If you want to know more regarding this move, see Geva Perry's analysis).
It seems that the cloud market and mostly the IaaS one is getting to their mainstream phase, where scale is a top factor and community is a major factor in survival.
Would you like to share you opinion? Can you add more information? Feel free to comment!
Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan
