Over on Slashdot, a vigorous discussion of a new paper by business-school profs from Harvard and Stanford called "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects," that takes it as read that businesspeople should want to clobber free and open source technology and replace it with proprietary lockware.
As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor … to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors.
Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source
