Looking Away

Sometimes I just have to look away. Once in a while, I see something that I feel must be embarrassing to the person experiencing it and not wanting to be a rubbernecker I look aside. This happens to me a lot on the golf course when someone is having a particularly bad day and they just can’t seem to find their swing. I am overcome with a sense of empathy as I watch someone flailing about helplessly trying to hit that little golf ball just a few yards further down the fairway.

I get the same feeling when I see some of the business models proposed in the software world. I’ve heard the arguments for and against just about every business model out there and I’m in a constant state of empathetic embarrassment as I watch young companies struggle with how they’re going to monetize their particular market.

What’s particularly frustrating is the seeming inability for companies to step away from the old models. It’s difficult for me to understand why companies trying to change the world with new technologies, new marketing models, new development models and new support models want to retain vestiges of the very businesses they want to replace.

A recent entry in Slashdot highlighted a blog entry from Jeff Gould on XenSource. I think that XenSource has been struggling to find their path towards successfully monetizing their market but what sent shivers down my spine was the discussion about their go-to-market strategy. XenSource wants to offer “a hybrid of open and closed source” to keep other players from taking their product.

I want to look away. I want to scream, “NO, DON’T DO IT!” I don’t understand. I can’t understand. One of the benefits of open-source, to me, is that the proprietary bits are no longer the product. The product is support for your customer’s business, their use of your product and how you, as a vendor, help the customer accomplish things the customer couldn’t otherwise accomplish. If you don’t fundamentally believe that you can provide that better than anyone else then you shouldn’t be in the business. If you truly believe that Red Hat or Novell can take your product and do a better job supporting customers than you can with the code that you’ve written and managed then you should probably let Red Hat and Novell do just that. After all, it would be a more efficient market.

I remember being in a product management meeting years ago and someone on the development team said that implementing a particular feature would “be hard.” I said, “Of course it is, otherwise, everyone else would have done it already. We’re in the business of doing hard stuff.” Whatever your business is it better be hard and you better be the best at doing it. Otherwise, why bother?