We've recently made a decision at OpenLogic to focus more on adding novel, valuable, instructive content to OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX).  Not that this hasn't been important in the past, but it's not been a top priority; building out our certified library has.

Here's a list of some of the topics that have been suggested by users in the past.  If you've got input into which of these (or something completely different) you'd like to see, please leave a comment:

• Install, configure, integrate LAMP stacks of various flavors
• Configuring Apache with SSL
• Top ten/twenty steps to take in order to harden MySQL for deployment outside the firewall
• Top ten/twenty steps to take in order to harden Apache for deployment outside the firewall
• Building Apache on AIX
• Open source alternatives to common commercial applications in various domains
• Choosing the right open source tool for the job (various domains)
• A common sense guide to open source licenses
• Creating an open source policy for your enterprise

As you can see, some of these topics have a technical slant, others a business slant.  I'm curious which topics will be the most popular.

Replicator quoting research which shows that people who customize their car (from bumper stickers to whatever) are more likely to engage in road rage.  The logic is that the customization is indicative of someone that thinks of their car as personal space and more easily tilts when confronted with bad driving.  I didn't read the study (written by CSU profs and published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology), but I can only assume that this is a correlation and that no causation was implied in the study.

In the world of web apps, we're all searching for that secret sauce that makes a site "sticky." Features that allow customization are often considered sticky. This logic seems to assume, at minimum, that customization of a thing reinforces strong feelings for the thing - if not outright causation of those feelings.

It would be interesting to know if the more bumper stickers a driver had, the shorter their fuse…  If so, I have another theory to explain the observations.  Perhaps the causal agent of road rage is insanity and all that's really illustrated here is that folks with lots of bumper stickers on their rides are a little nuts.  Perhaps the same can be said of folks with lots of Facebook apps?

Matthew Aslett recently completed a tour of Europe, profiling open source policies and usage in European countries.  Tongue-in-Cheek, he presents a summary of his findings in football tournament format:

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/06/30/open-source-champions-of-europe/

Over on the 451 CAOS Theory blog, Matthew Aslett  references the CIO.com’s Executives Online blogathon where respondents indicated that Google was their first choice destination when looking for open source software.  Matt says he was expecting more mention of sites like OLEX.  Take the same survey this time next year, and I'll bet that open source aggregation sites like OLEX will get much more attention.

Why?  Because open source has a very long tail. We know from the success of businesses/products like Amazon and iTunes that when it comes to navigating a long-tail, nothing beats domain-specific filters.  Google is the best in the world at search, but in a generic context, they can't help navigate a long tail like a domain-specific site can.  Google themselves realizes this, which is why they've created several domain-specific search services like Blog Search, Book Search, Scholar, and Google Maps.

If we do our jobs here at OpenLogic, in the future Google searches pertaining to open source projects will lead the searcher to OLEX.  From there the user will find what they are looking for, plus a whol lot more.  As we develop more features to help our users navigate the long-tail of open source, users will start coming straight to OLEX when they are looking for open source; like many of us now go to Amazon when looking for a book, or iTunes when looking for music.

In his recent blog post, “When Innovation Pays Off”, Jeremy Thomas recounts a recent success enjoyed by his team at active.com. As you might guess from the post title, this success was fueled by innovation, specifically by the innovative action of a single team member.

Innovation is clearly not for everyone. Many companies pride themselves on doing things the tried and true way, or on executing perfectly, rather than doing something new & bold. There are, however, not many surer paths to success than lightning-in-a-bottle innovation. Well managed, innovative R&D can lead a company to amazing technological breakthroughs, market dominance, and financial success. Poorly managed attempts at innovation, however, can take the company down a much uglier path – Think: New Coke. So, how do you harness the creative potential of you customers and employees to innovate for success?

As a product manager, I am constantly saying that we need to “ask the customer what they want.” We use personas in our product design sessions here at OpenLogic, and rarely a day goes by that I do not interact with a customer. I am an advocate of usability testing and beta programs. I thrive on customer feedback, but I often forget that you cannot rely upon the customer to innovate. Let me say that again – you cannot rely upon your customer to innovate for you. Countless studies have shown that customers simply do not make the leap required to be truly innovative. This is not a knock on your customers. Doubtless, they are smart folk with the capacity to think outside the box. When they innovate, however, they will be doing so in their own line of business – not yours. My own take on this is that innovation requires a certain amount of mental steeping in the problem domain. Your customers simply don't spend enough time dedicating their gray-matter to your business. Get them together for a ½ day focus group and they are more likely to suggest small modifications to your existing product than they are to come up with something truly innovative. If you want to innovate, you're going to have to do it yourself. The good news is that, unless you run a one-man show, you are surrounded by smart folks who spent a great deal of their time contemplating the problems that exist in your business, and they've got some killer ideas; the trick to successful innovation is harnessing them.

Google gets this, which is why they have famously provided their employees with “20-percent time.” Many of the successful new product released by Google over the years are products of this 20-percent time, including Gmail and Adsense. IBM has done something similar with their “THINK Fridays.” Try suggesting this tactic to your management, however, and you will likely meet resistance not seen since you suggested that the company provide only decaf in the break room. Why? The truth is that your management doesn't believe that you and your fellow employees will work on anything that might benefit the company. An argument against 20-percent time that I've been guilty of presenting in the past is that we're a small company, we can't afford to focus our resources on anything but our core product. The truth is just the opposite – we can't afford not to have our resources focused on innovating.

OK, problem solved right? Let your team take one day a week and work on whatever floats their boat. Maybe attach some stipulation that says it must, in some way, relate to your business and that, of course, products of this 20-percent time belong to the company. Then just sit back and wait for the light bulbs to start popping up over their heads. Pick a few, build 'em, market 'em, and retire young. Simple, right? How's that Hertz commercial go – not exactly. The truth is that your employees are likely to go to the opposite extreme as your customers. Rather than suggest minor tweaks to existing products, they'll come up with often brilliant, but way-out left-field ideas that for any number of reasons cannot be monetized by the company. You're not trying to start a think tank. You want ideas that can quickly be turned into profit. So what's a good capitalist to do? Well, I believe that there is a way out of this predicament – a way to find a balance between ho-hum minor product changes and far-out ideas that are “someone else's business” - it's mixing 20-percent time with a concept called TRIZ.

TRIZ (pronounced trees) is a formalized process for creative problem solving and is credited as the methodology behind thousands of patents from Fortune 500 companies including Proctor & Gamble, Boeing, and Philips Electronics. Based on work by Russian engineer Genrich Altshuller, TRIZ provides a set of patterns which can be applied to virtually any product or service to catalyze innovation. To arrive at these patterns, Altshuller analyzed and categorized patented inventions for over twenty years, seeking patterns across the various inventions. This effort eventually led him to his “40 Principals of Invention.” Since 1969, many other brilliant inventors and process engineers have added to this rich methodology with derivative works.

TRIZ is very pragmatic. Rather than requiring great leaps of thought to invent, TRIZ relies upon the application of one or more of the principals in order to remove technical contradictions; e.g. how can an object grow in size, but not increase in weight. By having developers leverage principals of TRIZ, you can bound their creative juices in a way that is much more likely to yield salable ideas.

Jacob Goldenberg, Roni Horowitz, Amnon Levav, and David Mazursky, the authors of “Creativity in Product Innovation”, have created a derivative work based upon TRIZ that they call “generic innovation patterns.” To illustrate how TRIZ works, let's take one of their patterns, Subtraction, and see how it might work in practice. The subtraction pattern instructs the engineer to remove important features from a product. In so doing, they are faced with the need to replace that feature, live without it, or require other features to perform double-duty. Consider your standard PC. It has a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and maybe some speakers. The subtraction pattern would encourage you to remove the keyboard, and mouse. How then would you get user input; perhaps via voice recognition or touchscreen. This is an incredibly simple example, but it illustrates the point. Rather than sending your engineers into the lab carte blanche, have them start with your existing product and a set of innovative patterns. What comes out of the lab is more likely to be salable to your existing market, by your existing sales team.

We're considering adapting this practice at OpenLogic. If we do, I'll keep you posted on ideas that come from the exercise.

Jeremy Thomas posted a very cool presentation about SCRUM in his Agile Development blog post. We use SCRUM to develop products here at OpenLogic and I don't think that I'll ever use another development methodology. I've worked in waterfall, spiral, and rapid iteration environments, but nothing compares to the ease and efficacy of SCRUM.

As product manager, it's my job to make sure that the efforts of our hard-working & brilliant engineers are channeled correctly.  This means solving the right problems, for the right people, in the right manner.  By recognizing that software development is a complex and unpredictable process, largely relying upon empirical controls, SCRUM makes my job much easier.  SCRUM avoids scope creep, the death march, the blame game, and many other ugly situations that most the software development world have come to accept as part of the job.

As I consider life after OpenLogic (shudder the thought but all good things do come to an end), I've been meaning to put together a SCRUM presentation that I could use to sell a future employer on SCRUM. Jeremy has done an admirable job. Maybe I can talk him into putting it into a portable format and distributing it under an open source license…

Glyn Moody wrote an interesting article for the Guardian earlier this month titled “Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft.”  It got me thinking about commoditization; specifically pondering the question:  Is Linux driving the O/S towards commoditization as many would have us believe?

The key point of Mr. Moody’s article is that several converging market forces are poised to impact Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system and productivity software markets.  Those forces are as follows:

• low hardware cost of the new ultra-portable computers such as the Asus Eee
• low memory and storage requirements of many Linux distributions
• increasing memory & storage requirements of Windows distributions
• emergence of free web-based productivity applications

While the author briefly mentions the usability of the Asus Eee as being responsible for its success, his primary argument revolves around the cost differential between the Linux and Windows versions.  He rightly points out that while consumers are being drawn to web-based applications such as Gmail and Google Docs, and are spending an inordinate percentage of their computing time using a web browser (all of which require very few client-side physical computing resources as opposed to traditional desktop apps); each new release from Microsoft requires more and more physical resources from its host system.  These resources are needed to support a glut of features that the “everyday user” finds unnecessary, and for which they are unwilling to pay a significant premium.  As the premium for Windows systems increases as a percentage of the price of alternative Linux systems, Windows will lose market share.

I hope that I’m not putting words in his mouth, but it seems to me that Mr. Moody is saying that the operating system is on the road to commoditization and that, as a commercial product, Microsoft Windows will not be able to compete with its free open source alternatives.  While I agree with all of the noted observations, I don’t quite buy the demise of Microsoft as a conclusion.  Now, as representative of an open source advocate, I know that I’m treading on thin-ice if I defend Microsoft, but bear with me for a moment….

The simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to desktop computing, the operating system is absolutely not a commodity.  Here are some numbers to back-up that statement:

• Microsoft reported a 15% growth in revenue from 2006-2007.  Much of this growth is attributed to sales of Office and Windows Vista (over 100 million copies of Vista sold in ‘07).
• Microsoft reported $14.8 billion in revenue from Windows licensing in 2007, 80% of which came from their OEM channel.
• Apple reported $10.3 billion in revenue from sales of Macs in 2007; another $1.5 billion in software sales, including their new UNIX-based Leopard operating system.

If the operating system market was commoditized, then by definition cost would be the primary point of competition.  As we can see, more than a few consumers and businesses chose costly, proprietary operating systems from Microsoft and Apple over free Linux alternatives.  I don’t believe that a stronger argument need be made against the thought that the operating system is commoditized.

Instead of commoditization, what we’re seeing in the ultra-portable market is the realization of a viable niche for Linux.  Economically, this is much more interesting than commoditization, but it won’t have much of an impact on Microsoft’s business which is largely driven by corporate purchases of new servers, workstations and desktop productivity applications.  Users of these business applications aren’t about to migrate to ultra-portables anytime soon.  Alas, I also do not see these folks migrating to Linux anytime soon.  The reasons there are many and varied – a good topic for a future post.

Instead of the demise of Microsoft, I see further gains by Linux here at the expense of special-purpose proprietary operating systems.  As the manufacturers of consumer devices realize the tremendous advantages in cost and time-to-market that come with using Linux over cooking up their own O/S, we’ll see Linux (and other complimentary open source software packages) in more consumer devices in the coming years.  The implications here are many and all are good for the consumer; lower prices, cross-device compatibility, and easier mods among them.