On Aug 10, 6:50 pm, Mark Derricutt <[email protected]> wrote: > Two dying companies joining forces to make one uber corpse? :-) > In part it feels like VMWare trying to find a new market now that > virtualisation is commodotized, and also Springsource the same now that > DI/IoC is.
If you mean "commodity" in an economic sense, then I think you're wrong. It's popular to assume just because there's a free (as in beer) operating system / database / application server then that respective market has now been commoditized, but this doesn't make any more right. ;-) Take a look at this excellent PDF which talks about software, commodity and open source licensing / business models: http://stephesblog.blogs.com/presentations/BrentWilliamsEclipseConV02.pdf If you just look at one page, look at page 35. The short version: In commodity markets there's no switching cost between products and no excess profits for producers, pricing moves quickly, the lowest-cost producer wins, and producers can't affect demand, only supply. Examples are milk, electricity, oil or gold. None of that is true for enterprise software - IBM, Oracle and Microsoft still make a lot of money, there are switching costs that prevent you from switching, Oracle only raises prices once a year, Linux / MySQL / JBoss hasn't taken over the world, and producers create new categories all the time (relational databases, portals, app servers). --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
