Read on Twitter
This is a great thread.
Literally every company mentioned here is doing what makes strategic sense for them to do at the time given their position in the market (underdog, incubent, etc.). https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1341204452829609984
Literally every company mentioned here is doing what makes strategic sense for them to do at the time given their position in the market (underdog, incubent, etc.). https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1341204452829609984
Open source and standardization have become tools leveraged to commoditize the layer on top of which incumbents are operating or to attempt to disrupt incumbents by commoditizing their competitive advantage.
Hence AWS is busy contributing to opening up software that strengthens its position. It contributes to open source that it can bundle in its offering and makes it less likely for its customers to have to rely on multiple cloud providers to get their job done.
Obviously, that's not a bad thing for its customers. Who wants to have to interface with eight different services when they can get the job done using two?
But it also strengthens AWSs position which ends up hurting competition, which turns out not to be too good for customers in the long run.
There's a great book on similar forces at work in the news industry: The Internet Trap by @MattHindman.
GCP, on the other hand, is busy contributing to open source that can disrupt AWS: open source that prevents customer lock-in and makes it easier for customers to change cloud provider (i.e. move from AWS to GCP, Google has literally no interest in the opposite happening.)
Some great insights and visualization about this in @swardley's 2014 OSCON keynote: (from 9:03 onwards in particular, but the whole talk is well worth the 13 minutes you'll spend on it).
What's fascinating about @swardley's mapping techniques is it perfectly explain where companies should focus their open sourcing efforts to maximize strategic benefits regardless of their position in the market.
Of course, the roles would be completely interchanged if their respective market position were different.
And this has happened multiple times in the past.
Microsoft, who is today's open source champion, used to be fervently opposed to it when it was the market leader.
Microsoft, who is today's open source champion, used to be fervently opposed to it when it was the market leader.
What changed is that companies now better understand how they can benefit from contributing to open source and standards regardless of their market position and even when they're incumbents.
For example, Facebook, which is the market leader for social media, leverages open source to lower its operating costs by commoditizing the hardware components of its data centers (thanks to @OpenComputePrj).
Hence, more companies contribute more, and more often.
What they contribute to, and with what strategic goals in mind will depend on their market position and how they're trying to leverage open source to gain a competitive advantage.
What they contribute to, and with what strategic goals in mind will depend on their market position and how they're trying to leverage open source to gain a competitive advantage.
Engineers intuitively know this. Those who can afford to will move from company to company to continue working on essentially the same standard work or open source project but with better alignement with their employer's business objectives.
That said, only a few players have such a strong sense of how to leverage open source effectively. For most companies, contributing to open source is still mostly something they reluctantly agree to when pressed by their engineers.
