Open MSFT
Microsoft has started to flirt with Open Content, and now they have joined the Open Content Alliance, of course to compete against Google:
In a surprise move, Microsoft said it would create its new MSN Book Search service by working with the Open Content Alliance, a group founded to digitize and index books and other media. The group's founding members include Yahoo!, the very competitor from which Microsoft is trying to untie other parts of its Internet search business.
Why are we so surprised? Microsoft is becoming the contemporary IBM, powerful, unchanging, boring and shoddy. So, what do they do? They revert to Open Content, just as IBM did, in order to transform their business model.
Either I am delusional or I am the best prognosticator ever: The threat of open content is just too great: I can work for free in my little laptop with the same functionality that the thousands of dollars of software that are installed in the corporate machine in the table next to me, and with bigger connectivity and social software come both a higher level of interaction and more quality for our dear OO than ever before. Why, then, spend so much money on crappy products, while I can install all this for free in my machine?
We are replacing this technology for commodities: software is a commodity now, and we are facing an environment where software will have increasingly complex functionality on it, and will be taylored specifically to cater to tastes and particular environments.
Content and differentiation.