Very insightful. Reminds me of a talk I saw Tim O'Reilly give at OSCON back in the day, basically about this same concept. He described it as "moving up the stack", with each successive phase commoditizing the thing beneath it (hardware at the bottom, then software, then services). Here's a link to his writeup of the concept (although it's kind of dry -- I remember the presentation itself having more pictures and being more engaging):
http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html
I wonder what's going to sit above "services" in the next phase? Maybe the services will be commoditized because there will be so many of them that do similar things and they all talk to each other via RESTful interfaces... so then the thing that's valuable is whatever sits above that. Identity systems? Yahoo Pipes? I dunno... predicting the future is hard, let's go shopping!
"I wonder what's going to sit above "services" in the next phase?"
IMO, and I suspect Tim's as well given his "data is the Intel inside" comments, data will be the next major revenue stream. Consider that open source software generally excels at distribution, but is poor at customer conversion.
Open source vendors would be wise to gradually de-emphasize customer conversion mechanisms such as open core or hybrid source in favor of maximizing usage and thus the size of the dataset they may generate. This data can then be analyzed and sold to customers as analytics or to third parties interested in broader trend data.
See Spiceworks, Sonatype Insights etc as indications of where this market will go.
Brilliant! This makes a lot of sense. Interestingly, though, I see data as working in tandem with services (as the services are the ones that would be able to make use of the data) as opposed to the data commoditizing the services. I guess that's okay -- this theory is just a model, not immutable laws of physics :)
EDIT: Okay, I just looked at those two companies, and I totally get it -- they commoditize the services by making the service free (which they can do because they're making money off the data they gather from the free users). Consider my mind blown.
I wonder what's going to sit above "services" in the next phase? Maybe the services will be commoditized because there will be so many of them that do similar things and they all talk to each other via RESTful interfaces... so then the thing that's valuable is whatever sits above that. Identity systems? Yahoo Pipes? I dunno... predicting the future is hard, let's go shopping!