The day job is running a trial of Books24x7, a commercial service offering on-line access to technical books. Unlike Google Books or Amazon’s Search Inside, it offers the text of books as text, rather than scanned pages. Whether this makes it any easier to read or not is a different matter – but I digress.

I noticed Books24x7 has in its virtual shelves Does IT Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage by Nicholas G. Carr, published by Harvard Business School Publishing (as does Google Books now), a full-length book based on his notorious Does IT Matter article where he argued IT was bound to become just a commodity product. One footnote gives the flavour:

A resource becomes a commodity, in this view, when it is readily available to all competitors and therefore provides no lasting distinction to any one company. A commodity input for a user is not necessarily a commodity product for a supplier. Think of Microsoft Office. No company gains an edge by buying a license to use Office—it’s a commodity input shared by most companies. For Microsoft, however, Office is anything but a commodity. Through various means—control of the PC desktop, manipulation of standards and compatibility, network effects, and high user switching costs—Microsoft has been able to continue to sell Office at a premium price and earn enormous profits from what is now a mundane product.

This is of course music to my ears, and there’s a lot more like it. But what really captured my interest was a passing reference to the origins of open-source, fifty years ago. I’m away to look up some of his references – this threatens to be an interesting historical dig.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.