Navigating the Vast Ocean of Open Source 23
Nerval's Lobster writes "Open source is no longer relegated to the discount software vendor that serves cash-strapped startups. In enterprise software development these days, open source is not only immensely valuable, but increasingly crucial to stay competitive in releasing high quality software at regular intervals in a world where technology is changing so fast and every edge matters. Today, rolling your own logging package instead of using something like log4j is as silly as trying to build your own web server instead of using Apache httpd was 10 years ago. Still, there are other components like guava that are less well known, but are currently making a name for themselves as libraries that can take the solution you are building to the next level of sophistication and quality. Just knowing they exist — and knowing where they fit — can help you design and build better software at a lower cost. In addition to conducting a traditional build versus buy analysis, it's critical to think about the maintenance and support story surrounding an open source package. This article lists some things to consider and questions to ponder."
Re:Biggest problem: support, customization (Score:4, Informative)
So you are admitting that Linux had a strong showing in servers? This would be precisely the area that is supposed to be driven by being able to call a company like Microsoft. That's a bit of a contradiction.
You are also giving Microsoft far too much credit as a server support vendor when the real competition is the likes of Oracle, or Sun, or IBM. Microsoft is a lightweight by comparison.
By your own admission Linux thrived despite of this mentality where everyone assumes "you can't get fired for buying Microsoft"
"Desktop" software is pretty lightweight by comparison.
What Google has is marketing. Guerilla marketing just doesn's work with n00b consumers. It's not like professional tools where all you have to do is "build and they will come". You need to dress it up and run TV ads and all manner of flim flam.