A bit of a buzz among the IBM community about the recent article about the Anglican Church in Sydney to use Lotus Symphony over and above MS Office. Have a look at the video below and listen to George Lymbers chat about how he wants to move away from licensed software.
Reading between the lines this chap wants to use Open Source software that doesn't have any license costs but does have a support structure - just in case a problem needs to be fixed. As software and the qualities of service of running software e.g. scalability, resilience, performance etc becomes a commodity then this model looks likely to become more and more popular.
It increases the pressure on software houses to develop more innovative and value added software capabilities while moving chunks of older function into the open source communities but does this only apply to on-premise software?
I would argue no to that point, if soho, google, cloudo can start to deliver higher quality offerings from the cloud then the business model becomes a flat charge for storage, power, bandwidth and maintenance and everything else including the software is free......
Following on from this train of thought why will people develop high quality software - for fun, kudos, because they can? or would it be to drive volume business on cloud computing sites?
The question arises, what will be the next generation of value added services that software vendors can actually charge customers for? Todays innovative products become tomorrows commodity - what's next?
Passion, Personal Responsibility, A bit wee a bit wah.
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