Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk has launched a new Podcast called Hark. In his second episode, he and Agile programming guru Kent Beck have a thoughtful discussion around the ideas in O'Grady's book "The Software Paradox."  Even though software is "eating the world" and become more widespread and strategic, its economic value appears to be declining rapidly. Certainly, we've seen a shift in the …

There is a good article over at Re-Code by ex-Microsoft VP Steven Sinofsky called "The Four Stages of Disruption".  It describes the evolution of products and markets through disruption, drawing from Sinofsky's own insights and also building on the work of Everett Rogers ("The Diffusion of Innovations") and Clayton Christensen ("The …

We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.

What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, …

 
A longer version of this story is published at www.opensources.com

Last week, Barnes & Noble announced they would cut the price on their wireless Nook eReader, from $259 to $199 ($149 for a new WiFi-only edition.)  Many thought this was a good opportunity for the third place contender to gain market share.  But within a few hours Amazon beat Barnes & Noble's price by $10, marking down the Kindle …

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation at the Apache Lucene Eurocon in Prague. It was a good conference focused on Lucene/Solr open source search technology and sponsored by Lucid Imagination.  

I've posted the bulk of the presentation below.  (I omitted a couple of slides that were MySQL specific.) Even though it was a technical conference, I got positive feedback from the attendees and organizers that the information was useful in helping folks think about where to focus their efforts.  

The slides have been posted to Box.net and are shown using their new "embedded preview" feature which is pretty cool. …

I promised in last week's post on "How to Kill Good Ideas" to follow up with some ways that more constructively help create new ideas.  The first of these is taken from an idea by Mats Kindahl's post of two other ways to kill ideas. Without further delay, here they are...

1. Make it safe to contribute ideas
   The best way to do this is encourage risk taking and acknowledge that some ideas will fail and that's acceptable.  The people I know who are the most creative are also the most prolific when it comes to idea generation.  And some of those ideas are, objectively speaking, total crap.  But there are so many good ideas generated in the process, it really doesn't matter.
2. …

 
 I'm an advisor, investor and board member to several startup software companies including Revolution Computing, Pentaho and most recently Erply a new Software as a Service (SaaS) company.  One of the common threads I look for is the opportunity to disrupt a large market.

One of the things that made MySQL successful was its use of open source technology to disrupt the multi-billion dollar database market.  In Silicon …