January 7th, 2008
Should open source cheer Gates' swan song?
The Elvis of PC software has left the building.
Bill Gates’ announcement he will no longer do CES keynotes overshadowed anything else he said, and for good reason. (Picture from Engadget.)
Although the venue felt wrong.
Gates’ milieu was Comdex, not CES. Standing before an army of geeks, running slides and demonstrations, describing minute feature enhancements as revolutions, and using arcane technical language, that was his thing.
So open source advocates should not be cheering as he exits stage right, to pursue his new career as a philanthropist and humanitarian.
Because, all too often, that’s what we do.
The rise of CES, and the collapse of Comdex, has brought with it a new type of technology marketing. If Gates was Elvis, or even John Lennon, Steve Jobs is Paul McCartney, accessible, in tune with the market, polished, built for the long haul.
CES is Jobs’ kind of show, all flash and gee-whiz, all sizzle, with the steak (if it exists) carefully portioned-out and pre-chewed.
The open source world has no one to compare with Gates or Jobs. In fact its ethos is designed to avoid their being created.
Linus Torvalds is easy to miss in airports, which is how he likes it. So, for that matter, are Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens, We don’t do celebrity. We’re anti-celebrity. And the business model is based on cutting marketing to the bone.
As a result most open source marketing has the look-and-feel of an indie artist in a smoke-filled hall. Think John Mayer before he got discovered.
I mention Mayer because he got his start near my home, playing venues like Eddie’s Attic in Decatur. I find his current slick, polished image unfamiliar, a little phony. If Mayer were once open source marketing, he isn’t any more.
Open source, partly by its nature, abjures stardom and the trappings of stardom. The question for today is whether that remains an advantage.
If we’re to really make the mass market breakthroughs we want to make in 2008, we need to go to market with some image the mass market finds attractive.
Logos — whether the penguin, the gnu, the firefox — are cute. And there’s far more steak behind that sizzle than in most Apple keynotes.
But the cult of no personality which open source has developed over the last decade doesn’t fit the gadget decade. Even the Google guys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have more in common with Mayer than the big-name tech artists of the past.
So, is this a problem? Or is anonymity our strength? And if it is, how do we press that advantage?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/07/08
