Companies and Software
There are two kinds of companies in the world. The old kind that buys software and the new kind that doesn't.
Old-school thinking: We're building a large-scale application supporting 250,000 new users per day. We can't afford to trust such a critical infrastructure on some non-profit organization's web application suite or database engine. Who would we call if something went wrong?
Facebook's thinking: We're building a large-scale application supporting 250,000 new users per day. We use Apache / PHP / MySQL.
(figures from an interview with Jonathan Heiliger)
Another way to say this is if something goes wrong with a product an old-school company relies on, they want to hold another company accountable. In contrast, a modern company prefers to rely on the community instead. While an old-school company feels their risk is minimized by having all of their eggs in one large company's basket, a modern company sees that more as a liability and views the community as a place where risk is more distributed.
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Steve from Mountain View, CA
There is more to old/new companies than open source. There are two kinds of management in the world. The old kind thinks they know more than anyone else in the company. The new kind realizes management is the least qualified to make technical decisions, and lets talented people own their work.
Joel on Software had an interesting take from his past experience at Juno:
"Nobody at Juno owned anything, they just worked on it, and different layers of management happily stuck their finger into every pie, giving orders left and right in a style which I started calling hit and run management because managers tended to pop up unannounced, give some silly order for exactly how they wanted something done, dammit, without giving any thought to the matter, and leave the room for everyone else to pick up the pieces. The most egregious example was the CEO and president of the company, who would regularly demand printouts of every screen, take them home, and edit them using a red pen. His edits were sometimes helpful (spelling and grammar corrections), but usually, they demonstrated a complete lack of understanding as to what went into the screens and why they said what they said. For months later, we would have meetings where people would say things like "Charles [the CEO] doesn't like dropdown list boxes," because of something he had edited without any thought, and that was supposed to end the discussion. You couldn't argue against this fictional Charles because he wasn't there; he didn't participate in the design except for hit and run purposes. Ouch.
Hit and run management is but one symptom of what I would call Command and Control Management... something right out of the General Motors 1953 operations manual. In a particularly political company, it even becomes worse -- more like Command and Conquer management. It's completely inappropriate because it makes people unhappy, it causes the person with the least information to make the decisions, and it doesn't allow a corporation to take advantage of all the talents of the people it hired. If, like Juno, the corporation had been careful only to hire the brightest, most talented people, then it squandered an incredible resource and made those talented people frustrated as all hell. "
Management that acts like every employee is there to do their personal bidding is sure to doom the company, regardless of whether open source is used or not. Upgrade management first, then upgrade the software.
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