J
James Ingraham
@Curt: Also witness the tremendous fortunes made off of proprietary technology.
Here's a partial list of Fortune 100 tech companies:
7 AT&T
10 Hewlett-Packard
20 IBM
36 Microsoft
38 Dell
56 Apple
58 Cisco Systems
62 Intel
63 Oracle (post Sun, approx)
100 Amazon.com
See anybody who made a fortune on non-proprietary products? Now granted, some of these support open standards, and Dell and HP certainly have to use standards like PCI / PCI Express, ATX, USB, etc. But the big money is definitely in proprietary systems. Even Google, at 102, makes its big bucks from its highly secret search technology. Red Hat has learned how to monetize open systems, but they would need to grow by at least a factor of 5 to reach the Fortune 500, much less compete with Microsoft.
A special note about Xerox at 152. They invented Ethernet, the GUI, object-oriented programming, the mouse, desktop publishing, bitmap graphics, the integrated development environment, and the WYSIWYG concept. All of these are now "standards." They made money off of NONE of these things. (They also invented the laser printer, and that has been a source of income, but they have never done particularly well in the basic desktop printer space.)
My company used to program our machines in C, an open standard known by millions of developers. Our customers hated it, and we switched to Allen-Bradley PLCs to make them happy.
Profibus and DeviceNet may slowly be going away, but they have to count as commercial successes. EtherNet/IP and Profinet dominate, despite the ease and openness of Modbus/TCP. Profinet and OPC (both of which again must be considered sucesses) are both based on DCOM, about as closed and proprietary as a protocol can get. CIFS has done just fine. Even though IPX/SPX is dead now, killed by an open standard, it was a success for many years.
And don't forget the dead open systems, either. For every TCP/IP or Linux, there are hundreds of systems that DIDN'T make it.
We're WAY off topic at this point, but I think it has been an interesting tangent. Personally, I really prefer open standards. At a business level, I am much more practical.
-James Ingraham
Sage Automation, Inc.
Here's a partial list of Fortune 100 tech companies:
7 AT&T
10 Hewlett-Packard
20 IBM
36 Microsoft
38 Dell
56 Apple
58 Cisco Systems
62 Intel
63 Oracle (post Sun, approx)
100 Amazon.com
See anybody who made a fortune on non-proprietary products? Now granted, some of these support open standards, and Dell and HP certainly have to use standards like PCI / PCI Express, ATX, USB, etc. But the big money is definitely in proprietary systems. Even Google, at 102, makes its big bucks from its highly secret search technology. Red Hat has learned how to monetize open systems, but they would need to grow by at least a factor of 5 to reach the Fortune 500, much less compete with Microsoft.
A special note about Xerox at 152. They invented Ethernet, the GUI, object-oriented programming, the mouse, desktop publishing, bitmap graphics, the integrated development environment, and the WYSIWYG concept. All of these are now "standards." They made money off of NONE of these things. (They also invented the laser printer, and that has been a source of income, but they have never done particularly well in the basic desktop printer space.)
My company used to program our machines in C, an open standard known by millions of developers. Our customers hated it, and we switched to Allen-Bradley PLCs to make them happy.
Profibus and DeviceNet may slowly be going away, but they have to count as commercial successes. EtherNet/IP and Profinet dominate, despite the ease and openness of Modbus/TCP. Profinet and OPC (both of which again must be considered sucesses) are both based on DCOM, about as closed and proprietary as a protocol can get. CIFS has done just fine. Even though IPX/SPX is dead now, killed by an open standard, it was a success for many years.
And don't forget the dead open systems, either. For every TCP/IP or Linux, there are hundreds of systems that DIDN'T make it.
We're WAY off topic at this point, but I think it has been an interesting tangent. Personally, I really prefer open standards. At a business level, I am much more practical.
-James Ingraham
Sage Automation, Inc.