> As for marketing, I'm still mashing this around a bit. Most > interesting to me is that in a future where everything is open, > "marketing" would serve to unify products, rather than divide them. > In other words, you wouldn't have GnuCash vs Quickbooks -- you would > GnuCash AND Quickbooks, each providing a unique interface over a > common, standardized data storage mechanism for extended business > data, of which financial data is a part.
This will never ever ever happen; it is not a viable option, it will never ever happen. We have such abundant examples of this as a NON -OPTION I am baffled how it still gets floated as a thing. Quickbooks, Google, et al have no-zero-nada-zilch motivation to participate in such a model, and to bear the extra tedium, cost, and infringement on product development or time-line. This is fantasy land thinking - full stop. It imagines that somehow the underlying data model is irrelevant, which is FALSE, and is recognized by any software development with any real life experience. > Because collaboration infrastructure would provide very low barriers > to standardization No, it does not. > and because culture would provide high pressure to comply No, it does not. > (already indicated by the Convergence of the Web Browsers and the > availability of APIs on paid services like the above), Note: "APIs", plural. > a world where programs are siblings (i.e., interchangeable units) in > a "functionality hierarchy" seems perfectly conceivable to me. Such a world is unadulterated fantasy. We've been talking about that since the early 1990s. Interoperability is very very hard beyond some lousy least-common-denominator that makes nobody happy. Notice that the world is trending exactly away from inter-changeable components to emphatically more monolithic and proprietary systems: Office365, GMail+GoogleDocs+GoogleDrive, ... all tightly integrated ***within themselves***. APIs/Hooks provided for whatever bit of glitz you want/need to hang off the side. -- Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:[email protected]> GPG D95ED383 Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA _______________________________________________ Osdc-list mailing list | This is a place for our readers, writers, moderators and artists to discuss matters concerning Opensource.com and otherwise do the work that makes this a community practicing the open source way. Sign-up for our weekly newsletter: http://opensource.com/email-newsletter Send a message: [email protected] Change preferences: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/osdc-list Unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/options/osdc-list
