Although more and more computers are being built using off-the-shelf parts, which many in the industry consider to be ordinary commodities, standardization has yet to stamp out innovation and creativity in the PC market, said Kevin Rollins, Dell’s president.
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Instead of creating a bunch of boring products, standard components are making possible innovations such as computing clusters–groups of hundreds or thousands of computers that offer supercomputerlike performance–that were not possible before, Rollins argued.
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“As you know, the old model of technological innovation used to be an insider’s gain. It required developing a technological edge,” Rollins said.
Product innovation has shifted to finding new ways to use standard technology, he argued.
“The open innovation model brings more ideas and perspectives to bear on a problem and brings solutions to the market more quickly,” Rollins said.
Ultimately, as technology costs decrease, more companies will be able to put high-powered computers to work, he said.
“Quality goes up, costs go down and the cycle continues,” Rollins said. “We passionately believe that the standardization of (information technology) is driving innovation.”
Many of these same arguments apply equally well to open source vs. proprietary software. After all, open source is commoditizing software much as IBM (inadvertently) commoditized hardware twenty years ago when it created an open architecture that used off-the-shelf components for the IBM PC.
It’s hard to argue the commoditization of hardware has been a bad thing for the vast majority of us. IBM might have disagreed ten years ago, but even IBM eventually embraced commodity technology, and as a result is once again prospering.
Let’s look at what the commoditization of hardware has made possible. Millions upon millions of people who twenty years ago would never had been able to get within one-hundred feet of a computer now benefit daily from computing technology, whether this takes the form of tapping into the vast stores of knowledge available on the web, keeping in touch with distant family and friends, or participating in the numerous burgeoning online communities that are reshaping the social, political, and commercial landscape. Furthermore, entire industries have emerged around the ubiquity of the commodity PC, not the least of which are the software and Internet industries, creating countless billions of wealth and prosperity for millions.
So, what if IBM hadn’t accidentally commoditized computer hardware? What if proprietary IBM, DEC, and Data General still ruled the hardware world? Would there be a software industry, an Internet, a Microsoft, an Amazon.com, a Google, or any of that? No.
So, is “commodity” a dirty word? If you’re currently on top and want to hang on to the status quo for as long as possible, yes. For the vast majority of us that are hungry to shake things up and change the world, absolutely not.