ZDNet Australia, Microsoft: An open-source champion?:
Analysts at research firm Gartner have been applying Christensen’s theory to the IT environment and see the manifestation of disruptive innovation in open-source software.
Disruptive innovators primarily attack from the bottom-end of the market. Open-source software first emerged in research, then entry-level computing but is now slowly becoming mainstream, said Steve Bittinger, a research director at Gartner Research.
“It’s not a question of whether open source in itself is disruptive…it’s how vendors react to it,” Bittinger told ZDNet Australia ahead of his address at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in Sydney next month.
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“It’s often quite difficult to destroy disruptive innovators,” he said.
Bittinger predicts Microsoft will ultimately be forced to embrace open-source software the same way it had to embrace the Internet.
I wholeheartedly agree, and have spent a great deal of time over the past several months thinking, speaking, and writing about how open source represents the commoditization of software and the latest wave of disruptive innovation in the software industry. Here’s a roundup of my writings on this subject, for those who are interested (and, it seems to me, based on the increased level of discussion of these issues in recent months, people are finally starting to get it):
- Commoditization: The innovator’s opening (7/3/2003)
- Commoditization vs. innovation? (10/25/2003)
- ‘Commodity’ not a dirty word at Dell (9/22/2003)
- McNealy’s Last Stand (6/15/2003)
- Who will pay: Another perspective (6/7/2003)