I keep looking for academical papers that study FLOSS from different perspectives. A recent paper published in the January-February edition of the Production and Operations Management Journal just caught my attention. The paper was written by Daishin Lee (Harvard Business School) and Haim Mendelson (Graduate School of Business of Stanford), and it was titled “Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects”.
The authors use a theoretical model that propose two paths for software companies:
- If you are the first in the market, keep your product closed. Then, the FLOSS sector could not take advantage of the network you already created.
- If the FLOSS solution was first in the market, make your product compatible. Then, you would take advantage of the network created by the FLOSS solution.
The paper is clear that they are talking about the companies that do not want to go the FLOSS way (as Bill Snyder put it on a review of the article Business can win the competition against Open Source technology) Therefore, I am not going to argue that the best way is to stop competing. I just want to humbly help expand the work of Lee and Mendelson.
I take a statement on page 13 of the paper as a central point of my concerns: “Although Microsoft views Open Source Software as a serious threat, it has not made its core products compatible with Open Source products”.
There is an issue on the definition of compatibility. Let’s take the case of Microsoft Word. Are we talking compatibility as the ability to read Microsoft word files? If that is the case, Microsoft has always been interested that everybody can read its format. Now, if we are talking about the ability of Microsoft Word to read Open Documents, Microsoft announced on May of this year that Office 2007 was going to support the format.
Maybe the case of Microsoft Word is an exception. But, it would be nice to include it on future analyses.
By the way, too much competition sometimes leads to bad things (ask Wall Street).
If you had the money and the interest, maybe you bought the report. It would be nice to hear from you (I am not asking for a copy). Maybe Ovum found out that what other people have said about Open Source Software is true. I wonder if a PhD student can have done the same in 200 pages, getting a small grant from the UK government, and liberating the report later. Or the government can have paid for the report to Ovu and then made it available.
