The conversation du jour is whether companies benefit from being open and whether stealth is detrimental. And it isn't just about being open about what you are doing. It is about being open to conversations with diverse groups of people, especially your customers and users. Also, companies are baking open-ness into the structure of their products in order to benefit from the good will that ensues from being more open than the alternatives: open source + open APIs. Openness even affects how we develop our applications and how we solicit feedback. If innovations are in the open, innovation happens in almost real time. All of this open-ness makes "beating the competition" seem less important too. It is about focussing on the customer's needs. Your so-called-competitor really has nothing to do with the conversations necessary to make that happen. And if you are fighting for the same dollars, shouldn't you find new dollars to go after by talking to your customers and developing solutions that meet latent needs? Open-ness affects so much. We are just at the tip of the iceberg.
I subscribe to all this open-ness. But, of course, even the most open of all of us aren't revealing all our secrets and we all have to figure out how to generate income from being open. It is an interesting game we play.
Here's relevant links.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. (via Buck Paxton)
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