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'When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable' is an old truism that O'Reilly seems to be repeating in the video. However, imo when he sa
by credo 16y ago
'When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable' is an old truism that O'Reilly seems to be repeating in the video.
However, imo when he says that he 'realized that software was becoming a commodity', he is over-generalizing and his bias may be due to the fact that his focus is on the "adjacent things"
My bias is that I'm a product developer and don't see software as a commodity. The bias of developers who provide software for free and charge for "support" is likely to be that software is a commodity and that support is valuable. O'Reilly's belief in free software, belief in charging for e-books etc. seems to be leading to his bias.
imo there is value in all these models. Software is not going become a no/low value commodity anytime soon.
- nandemo 16y agoI haven't seen the video, but "software is becoming a commodity" might be just a sound bite. He might mean some specific kinds of (loosely speaking) "platform" or "general-purpose" software: OSes, browsers, media players, etc. Surely, all software is not becoming a commodity, since most software is made for a specific purpose and a lot of it is custom made.
- watchdogtimer 16y ago"'When something is commoditized, an adjacent thing becomes valuable' is an old truism that O'Reilly seems to be repeating in the video." Agreed. Clayton Christensen said this exact thing at an O'Reilly conference back in 2004: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/Clayton%20Christensen%20-%20Capturing%20the%20Upside.mp3 http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/Clayton%2... Christensen's presentation is worth listening to. He was remarkably prescient--he basically predicted the development and success of Android phones six years before their introduction.