Microsoft has news for those who hold to the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory. We’re linked with everyone else on the planet by 6.6 degrees of separation, not six.
As The Guardian recounts,
Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people
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Source:The Open Road
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CIO.com’s Ken Harris unleashes a torrent of abuse on the state of software quality in a current article. While he doesn’t bring it up, the problem is compounded by software licenses that disclaim all responsibility for the problems caused by
We call them “bugs” as if somehow
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Source:The Open Road
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Portland is one of my favorite cities on the planet, and this day I learned to love it even more. Portland’s transportation agency, TriMet, has been using open-source Openbravo POS since 2007 in its automated system to sell tickets and passes to the public. $4.5 million in transactions later, …
Source:The Open Road
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Jim Whitehurst is hitting his stride as Red Hat CEO, and does himself proud in this excellent ZDNet interview. Whitehurst was COO at Delta Air Lines prior to joining Red Hat, adding credibility to his take on the enterprise software game:
I was a senior exec, and like each other senior exec I had a huge IT budget. Mine was as big as Red Hat’s revenues last year. You sit there and say, “Why are my IT costs going up, but I’m getting less and less functionality?” Each IT professional states the same thing: my lights-on costs are going up. But wait a minute! I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up? I get the joke now.
If you look at the S&P 500, seven of the top twenty companies are tech, and other than Google, they’re not high-growth. But they’re just printing money because switching costs are so high. There’s this astonishing amount of residual goodwill to Red Hat because we’re seen as an alternative to that. Oracle announced a 20-something percent price increase just as the economy starts heading south. How can you do that unless you’re pretty sure nobody can switch? High switching costs led to infrastructure cost creep. Once you get hooked, you can’t get off.
Bingo. In the case of Oracle, industry consolidation has put it into a position of such power over its customers that it has killed off much of its competition. IBM and others have done the same. Enterprises now get to select between competing behemoths that have little incentive to lower prices.
Open source (and SaaS) might well be the only hope of bringing back meaningful competition to the enterprise software game. The problem, however, is that open source still lacks one trait that enterprise buyers, given their druthers, strongly prefer: Largesse. Who in open source can provide that security blanket?
… Source:The Open Road
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