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Friday, December 28, 2001 |
 Eric Sink dives into the is "Open Source a Flop of 2001" discussion with his hard won experience with AbiWord.
7:10:38 PM 
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BurningBird. Hey, you are right, I am a engineer that has turned into a suit (I have a degree in Astronautical Engineering -- essentially designing control systems for satellites and spacecraft. But, given the lack of demand for my craft, I am here).
6:13:34 PM
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Hey Dev(E)iate. Great comments about the open source mention. However, your site breaks my browser.
5:54:44 PM
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Phil Wolff dings me for picking Portals as a flop. FWIW, I wrote the first Portal report in August of 1996 while at Forrester (Wall Street didn't write a report on the topic and Halsey Minor didn't name them Portals until December 96). After a couple of meetings with Tim Koogle discussing strategy I was hooked. Portals were going to become the center of gravity for the Web for years to come. Those years have passed. General navigation is fine, but the low quality of links (experience the low quality of the "open" directory project as an example - my link is an example of their coverage of Segway) on centralized projects continues to decline.
In contrast, personal publishing is growing. It is taking hold. The rapid ascent of Paul Nakada's Segway Weblog is an example. It is #2 on Google for the topic (it is the top site for information about the product). Personal publishers could rule the next wave.
A single person with Radio 7.1 could have the most popular site on any topic they select. They could impact an entire market, during the critical early stages, that is potentially worth billions. My thinking is that there are individuals out there that are smart enough to build sites like Pauls. Name your topic, contact me (jrobb@userland.com) and let's get going...
5:33:07 PM
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Dave pointed to a great example of the type of open source rhetoric I thought was over the top. Here's another quote from Brian Behlendorf on the future of software (and he is only one of many, many people who thought this way):
"The question to ask is, will the model of paid-for software development that Userland is used to, as other big commercial software companies are used to, survive? Should they survive? What's a comparable situation - robots and automation replacing line workers in auto factories? Or stagecoach operators put out of business by the automobile before that? Huh?
3:20:42 PM
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Mark flames me for calling Open Source a "Flop of 2001." Hey, the reason it is a flop is this: it didn't live up to the hype. I don't dismiss the value of open source, but rather the bombastic rhetoric of its proponants. A lot of stuff was said by open source zealots in the last five years that doesn't hold together today.
For my flops list, I picked areas of technology that were most greatly impacted by the deflation of their hype balloon. Portals and 3G where the other two areas cited. All three were masters of the universe in 2000. Firms and individuals poured billions into them. They are now merely players on a larger landscape of technology. Portals aren't going away entirely and certainly not open source. 3G may be dead.
1:02:10 PM
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Comstock Partners. Tech stocks are still vulnerable. Basically, you can't have high P/E ratios (price to earnings ratios) on companies that are cyclical. They are right. The last downturn showed that big technology companies are now at a size where they are slaved to the broader economy.
The only technology companies that can support a P/E of 45 or more (or a price to revenue of 20 or more) are small. Why? Two reasons: the potential of a runaway hit (particularly in downloadable software) and the potential the small firm will be acquired at excellent multiples. Big Co's need not apply. They typically don't release wildly innovative products and they are often too large to be acquired.
9:57:34 AM
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eWeek. 2002, the year of .Net In other words: "Microsoft, please spend some ad dollars on us...."
9:03:56 AM
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>>>>
Register. Is downloading third party software to your organization's computers theft of computer resources, punishable by law? This guy is about to find out.
8:39:26 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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