Open source or proprietary?
Posted on June 20, 2008 | Categorized under Software
Open source software development methodology is based on voluntary contribution from geeks around the globe. Followers of it strongly believe into evolutionary and collaborative progress. It appeals to giving-back nature of people and as participants work on projects they enjoy to work on, naturally gives better quality products. On the other hand, proprietary i.e. closed source software development methodology is more formal in nature. Companies hire people with required skill set and pay them to develop products in required timeframes with specified requirements. Companies themselves have profitability motivations driven by competitive market. Open source seems more predominant in academia while proprietary looks prevalent in industry; which is quite as expected because knowledge sharing is the ultimate focus in academia while money is what counts most in industry.
“History confirms that knowledge sharing has fostered accumulative scientific progress avoiding reinventing-the-wheel phenomenon. If scientists had kept their inventions secret and instead had provided fees based services over those inventions, without revealing the logic behind it, then we would have still been in an era of wondering whether the Earth rotates round the Sun or the Sun rotates round the Earth!”
Open source supporters often argue somewhere along the above lines to promote it as a better software development methodology. And then counter arguments posed by proprietary software followers go into somewhat the direction below …
Is One Laptop Per Child really a solution?
Posted on June 13, 2008 | Categorized under Large Scale
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit initiative founded by Nicholas Negroponte (co-founder and director of MIT Media Lab). He has a vision to improve lives of underprivileged communities around the globe through betterment of education provided to their children. In his eyes, this laptop will act as a window for those curious kids to connect to each other and to a large information resource on the internet. “Whatever the solutions to the big problems are, they include education; sometimes it can be just education and (rest of the times) can never be without some element of education!“, he states.
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On the other hand, critics of this project often consider this as band-aid solution to a more serious injury. In their opinion, spending money on providing gadgets to people - who are yet struggling to meet their basic needs - is naïve and ridiculous.
What’s business model, precisely?
Posted on June 6, 2008 | Categorized under Basics
“Confusion” is the word that comes to my mind whenever I think of the term Business Model. It is one of the most loudly discussed topics, especially since 1990s. Interesting part is that most (or should I say almost all) of the research literature over this topic contain two arguments without fault –
The first argument is somewhat like -
“A good business model is an essential ingredient of business success.”And the second argument is somewhat like -
“Business model is a widely spoken but rarely understood concept.”
There are loads of research papers and published resources that talk about the concept of business model as well as the confusion over the topic; and often cause more confusion as different authors take different views.
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Blocking ads - have your cake and eat it too?
Posted on May 30, 2008 | Categorized under Internet
Many times I bump into some blog and even before having a glance at the article, I am presented with about 5-6 pop-up ads! After either closing or ignoring those, I start reading that article and at the same time, those square ad banners placed above, and below, and on both sides of the first paragraph start flashing with an exciting message on it as “you have won $50000″! I try hard to ignore it (though it continues flashing through my eye corners). And then suddenly voilà! The whole article disappears and another cool graphics turns up full screen with a polite message on top corner “Skip this ad to return to the article”. By the time, done with all this exercise; I am no longer in a mood to continue reading.
It is said that web 2.0 is about “wisdom of crowd” but is it really perceived in that sense by the crowd after all? All these new web technologies have made it a lot easier to launch a website stuffed with abundant of cool features — and that too without dropping a penny out of pocket! But is it all really helping to create informative web resources than mere duplications? Today we find tons of websites (yes, including blogs) revolving around same topics and even filled up with same content (generated using someone else’s rss feed). And what’s the motivation behind creating such websites? Well, conspicuously, it’s just about milking the gorgeous Google Adsense cow than anything else.
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What’s more important - idea or execution?
Posted on May 23, 2008 | Categorized under Basics
Once upon a time, there were two childhood friends named Tony and Carl. Both had dreams of running their own businesses. Tony had a great idea about building mindboggling toys and Carl had an equally great idea for building amazing cars. And then there was a twist in the story! As soon as they finished their colleges and about to start a company; they had to leave their city. Tony’s family shifted to BigMenCity and there was no demand, whatsoever, for any kind of toys. Whereas Carl had to move to WalkersTown, as his father promoted to a manager’s post into company’s branch office there; and as you might guess, nobody there was interested in cars. Nonetheless, our heroes were not ordinary! Given the oppressive circumstances, they still went ahead and started their businesses! Why? — Because they genuinely believed in the greatness of their ideas.
Few months went by and Tony realized that, however and whatever advertisement being done, there’re no chances to sale even a single toy in BigMenCity. He did some market research and figured out places near his city like AllKidsTown, KidsOnlyTown and LetsPlayTown. After discovering sales opportunities, he opened his toys stores there and started making at least some sales to survive. Few more months passed by and to his dismay, Tony found out that although people in those small towns were interested in toys, they couldn’t really afford the expensive ones those Tony had designed with great efforts and expectations. Tony was disappointed to see the sales chart showing off only ordinary toys so far. Tony started wondering how to convince people to buy his expensive but great toys. He indeed tried some marketing tricks desperately but alas! … it only confirmed that people there are too poor to buy into any tricks too.
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