start-ups are supposed to pivot like shit. gorillas are supposed to keep the lights on forever.
i know it's not that simple. at least start-ups have a reasonable option of open sourcing failed products. i don't know how often that works out, but it offers some consolation. gorillas have a much harder time. who knows what a service was hooked in to, what it was built off and what was was built off it.
it makes me think along a line i've thought many times. a friend once said "you either become a big company or a part of a big company". which means you either become a core service at a big company or part of a core service at a big company. or you're dead. a lot of services are going to get a bullet.
accept for a moment that is the right decision, scrappy start-up or goliath. there is obviously still value in a lot of these services to a lot of people. maybe they can't become big businesses. maybe they can't be important to big businesses. but they can still be important to many people, some of them with the capability to develop and run them.
when will open source extend to services? beyond libraries, and into applications themselves? services with open, distributed development and hosting. built and run by the community, for the community. the things happening with distributed data storage have to help, and a lot of the work going into making mobile applications efficient and responsive (every phone is a node in a network that is constantly being partitioned). it seems like this could open the door for a lot of things that don't really fit the "hit or quit" model.
Comments
start-ups are supposed to pivot like shit. gorillas are supposed to keep the lights on forever.
i know it's not that simple. at least start-ups have a reasonable option of open sourcing failed products. i don't know how often that works out, but it offers some consolation. gorillas have a much harder time. who knows what a service was hooked in to, what it was built off and what was was built off it.
it makes me think along a line i've thought many times. a friend once said "you either become a big company or a part of a big company". which means you either become a core service at a big company or part of a core service at a big company. or you're dead. a lot of services are going to get a bullet.
accept for a moment that is the right decision, scrappy start-up or goliath. there is obviously still value in a lot of these services to a lot of people. maybe they can't become big businesses. maybe they can't be important to big businesses. but they can still be important to many people, some of them with the capability to develop and run them.
when will open source extend to services? beyond libraries, and into applications themselves? services with open, distributed development and hosting. built and run by the community, for the community. the things happening with distributed data storage have to help, and a lot of the work going into making mobile applications efficient and responsive (every phone is a node in a network that is constantly being partitioned). it seems like this could open the door for a lot of things that don't really fit the "hit or quit" model.