Kim is here to announce her new company: SpikeSource.
"From egosystem to ecosystem: Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT."
Brazil kicked out Microsoft. Same with other governments. They demand Open Source. China is doing a Linux distro. Vendors are getting kicked out.
The industrial egosystem has worked well for a long time. It produced many large companies that were big top-down organizations. It's worked well for software too.
Then the Net came along. It changed advertising, commerce, and the software business. It's a home on the range for software developers. This new ecosystem will be filled with lots of new software, much of it Open Source. This gives power to the users. It's a revolution that we cannot stop.
Why is this happening? How'd we get here? OOP, CORBA, COM, etc. were attempts in the egosystem. But they didn't work. We needed a new ecosystem. And that ecosystem has arrived as Web 2.0. Demand began to supply itself.
Programmers started it--"scratch your own itch." Users followed. Wikipedia. Blogs, RSS, PodCasting. The old egosystem doesn't like this. Microsoft doesn't like it. Larry Ellison loves Open Source but thinks the software industry is headed down. Nicholas Carr says that IT doesn't matter--it's boring and a commoidity. It's a cost to control.
The IT guy is the unsung hear of corporate america. And in this new ecosystem, he's a superhero inside the new ecosystem.
Examples: Verizon phone booths getting wifi hotspots. Many cities are getting wifi. IBM mainframes as Linux farms.
Three rules: Nobody owns it. Everybody uses it. Anybody can improve it.
When anybody can improve software, it gets better. People participate. It's filling the software market with commodities. Customers love it, but the egosystem hates it. In fact, there are too many open source choices. That's hard for IT.
SpikeSource is here to solve that problem. They're an open source IT services company. They're moving up the stack to solve the new problems in the ecosystems. They'll provide pre-assembled stacks. 35 employees and contractors. Public beta in December. It is: validation, integration, testing, supporting, service/upgrading.
See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.
Posted by jzawodn at October 07, 2004 05:13 PM
