Will The Open-Source Movement Disrupt Your Industry?
Sam Klaidman
Partnering with midmarket B2B OEM leaders responsible for growing after-sales revenue and profit and improving customer loyalty.
When most of us read stories about how this industry or that one is being disrupted by low-cost, open-source products we say: “Can’t happen to me. Our products are too complicated, have too little volume, or just not interesting enough for the disrupters.”
Think again!
The first major high-tech industry to be disrupted by open-source products was software. Who ever thought that Windows would be competing with a no-cost, open-source software product called Linux? Or that Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera would take on (and beat) Internet Explorer? But this is an old story!
After Linux and the browsers came the 3D printer. It is the basis of additive manufacturing, which will have an impact on the machine tool industry and possibly the way field service organizations provide logistics support to their field engineers.
In preparation for this article I did some research on the open-source movement and immediately found three articles on Business Insider which rocked my world. Here are the titles, from which you can see why I was sitting at my computer with my mouth wide open:
“Inside Facebook’s Plan to Eat Another $350 Billion IT Market”, May 12, 2017
“AT&T just completed a first-of-a-kind test – and Cisco should be terrified”, April 5, 2017
“LinkedIn is working on a project that should terrify Cisco and the rest of the $175 billion hardware industry”, October 28, 2016
Within only 7 months, there were three stories about three large companies creating open-source products which may well disrupt the basic products of the high tech world.
Once I internalized what was really going on, I decided to do some Google searches and see how many results each search yielded. In each case I search on “Open source” then the exact term shown in the table, which also has the number of results in millions:
Of course, the results need explanation so here are a few examples:
The retail results appear to be very heavy with article about open-source POS software.
The Military results seem to be concentrated on open-source software also and the Finance results talk about Quicken and other software.
The Education results were concentrated in courseware and Transportation was concentrated in on-line booking projects.
Nonetheless, whether software, hardware, or courseware, people are seriously thinking about how then can get a piece of the sales pie while making a contribution to the welfare of the general population.
I hope this give you something new to think about. And please comment about how your industry is, or may be, impacted by the open-source movement.
Assisting B2B-OEM leadership to grow profits by supplying solutions retaining and improving the Productivity, Longevity, Availability and Capability of the assets populating the Installedbase.
7 年Open source is not only limited to embedded software employed on a machine; products defined as Commercial Off The Shelf [COTS] has revolutionized the design, cost, reliability and much more of commerical machines...and that has led OEMs to be final assembler and marketers of machines; they do little manufacturering and design engineering of components.