innovator's dilemma

Microsoft--down but by no means out

The living dead never looked so good.

For several years now Microsoft has been written off by friends and foes alike as a shuffling shadow of its former self, doomed to feed off the profits of past successes while it goes gentle into the good night of irrelevance. And yet Microsoft's profits remain enviable and its outlook far from bleak.

It may be too soon to engrave Microsoft's headstone as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently did.

Microsoft, after all, has a history of making dramatic changes in direction, changes that have saved it more than once from software … Read more

Disrupting the disrupters

There are many reasons to pine for the days of being a large, established software vendor. And then there is the fun of disrupting the ground out from beneath the feet of such vendors. It's great to have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

That was my thought when Roy Russo of Loopfuse (open source marketing and sales automation) sent me an update on its pricing/product plans. Some of the policies Loopfuse is rolling out will need to be amended as the company grows (like the lack of a contract to engage services). So, will Loopfuse become the kind of company that someone else will one day enjoy disrupting?

Still, in the meantime, wouldn't you enjoy poking the competition in the eye with these?… Read more

Will open source become bloated and decrepit?

Jesse Robbins over on the O'Reilly Radar offers up a sobering reminder to those of us who feel that we are disrupting the software industry for the better: we may well end up becoming that which we disrupt. This is in line with Clay Christensen's "innovator's dilemma" argument.

In other words, you are what you eat. (Or will be what you eat.)

Making this disruption thing sound even worse, Nick Carr notes just how bleak disruption can be, a la BlackBerry addiction:… Read more