21st Century Enterprise - Microsoft Should Have Gone Open Source Long Ago (Part 1)

Scott G. McNealy voiced his opinion about Solaris at Churchill Club in Santa Clara, Calif.: "The mistake we made was putting it on our own hardware. If we hadn't metal-wrapped it, it would have been more widely adopted. If we had put Solaris early on an Intel box, Linux never would have never happened."

That was long ago and world has changed a lot since then. There were no smart phones and tablets at that time and cloud computing only started to appear on industry radar.

Apple came up with a new idea of metal wrapping its OS for hand held devices in form of their "i" series of products. Apple for sure targeted the market with absolute precision and proved that their business model worked. At paradigm level, however, they repeated the same mistake Sun Microsystems made. In fact Apple is just the newest example of repeating a mistake that Palm and Blackberry successfully made in the past.

After Apple set the trend in market for modern hand held devices, a more aggressive contender called Google started challenging Apple with the help of Open Source community in form of Android. Now what do you think is going to happen with Apple? May be what ever is happening with Blackberry. Well, based on statistics from Business Insider, I think, metal-wrapping of OS will most likely compel Blackberry to get out of hardware business or at least outsource its hardware division and follow the IBM's business model for personal computers.

Sun failed to differentiate between software and hardware sides of their business. They made software division of their business ruled by hardware division when IMHO it is technically more appropriate to position both of the divisions parallel to each other.

Continue Reading >> Part 2