From “Internet Traffic” to “Open Source Community”
For quite a long time I’ve been convinced that Web 2.0 sites and Open Source projects were actually different representations of the same idea: the way of using Internet to develop something virtually by the seamless coordination of small contributions. Be it professional networks, encyclopedias, movies or software, they all follow the same dynamics and should be analyzed together, learning lessons from one field to apply to another.
I have been pretty surprised not to find many people with the same approach, as I think the similarities are obvious. But, finally, a few days ago I stumbled upon an article by Gary Little, an investor in both consumer Internet companies and open-source enterprise software companies, explaining that “both are Internet companies, and many of the lessons we learned first from consumer Internet companies are turning out to be directly applicable to more recently emerging open-source companies”.
Some ideas taken directly from the article:
- Both employ many of the same techniques to acquire, engage, grow, and monetize their user base.
- The most successful consumer and open-source companies tend to be engineering-centric. More like Google than, say, AOL.
- Once the service or product becomes attractive enough, it then draws value from its new expanding community. The sites that aggregate the most contributions also attract the highest number of users, creating a virtuous cycle and a dominant leader.
- The final step is actually making money, and here is where the two types of companies diverge. Consumer Internet companies monetize their free offerings by selling targeted advertising or clicks. Open-source companies monetize their offerings by identifying the one out of 100 business users who need 24/7 support or additional training.
- In our experience, executives who come from the hierarchical world of traditional enterprise software are not well suited for such a mission — for the same reasons that they would be ill-suited to run a consumer Internet company. Instead, successful open-source executives are likely to come from such nontraditional backgrounds.
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Camino a la empresa 2.0 — 30 October 2007 @ 2:26 am
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By Toñico, 24 October 2007 @ 9:21 am
So much true in that comparison.
Another related approach (more hardware based) is the collaborative wifi connection, such as the ones undertanken by FON and Free.fr, which aim to create an ubiquitous wireless network built collaborations. In here, each subscriber provides a part of its bandwidth and coverage available to others. The more users in the network, the more value it has, thus encouraging community expansion.