March 9th, 2008
Will it always be about Microsoft?
In a rather heated argument during MIX 08 last week, Miguel de Icaza (right) made a provocative statement the reporters in the room seem to have glossed over.
“There is a feature beyond selling corporate [software] and patents … it’s going to be owning end users.”
Mr. de Icaza was referring here to Google, but he could have been referring to any Web 2.0 destination like Facebook or MySpace.
Customer control is moving from software to the Web, thus to Web sites and the tools used to create them.
That sounds good, so long as consumers are free to switch their loyalty among sites and tools.
But any playing field, once created, tends to tilt. Even an open source playing field.
My personal blog is on a hosted version of Movable Type called Typepad, for instance. It’s been there two years and now contains nearly a gigabyte worth of stuff. Think I want to move it?
By contrast, this blog, like all ZDNet blogs, runs on WordPress. Good old open source WordPress. (Here, let me give you a copy.)
OK, Movable Type is now open source. How much better than WordPress would Movable Type have to become before ZDNet switched?
A whole lot better is my guess.
So what, in the end, is the difference between my ties to Typepad and my older ties to, say, Microsoft Word? Or ZDNet’s ties to WordPress?
Sure, Movable Type and WordPress are far less evil than Microsoft now, insofar as open source is concerned. But it’s like power, make it absolute and corruption is almost inevitable.
Right now, it seems everything is about Microsoft because its software is a de-facto standard, and it’s accused of constantly manipulating that standard to maintain its advantage.
As that changes, as the battle shifts from client software to the Web, does Google become the ogre?
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.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 03/09/08
