This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Will MS get commoditized? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Jeremy Allaire asks an interesting question - when will Microsoft get commoditized?

I've been spending considerable time looking at the economics of software manufacturing and distribution%A0in the face of open source and offshore software development, and it strikes me that in the near future Microsoft will clearly face an erosion of their core software margin business as a result of the commoditizing economics of clone software manufactured in China at 1/100th (or less) the cost of manufacturing the software in Redmond.%A0

Well, there are some differences between hardware and software. With hardware, anyone can clone once the specs are available. Software just isn't like that. For one thing, "the specs" are usually very loose (say I want to clone Word. Where are the specs?). Look at ongoing efforts like OpenOffice, for instance - it sucks, and in most of the same ways that Word sucks. Network effects play a role here as well - for shops that have built a lot of behavior on top of Word, Excel, Outlook (etc) - "close" just doesn't cut it.

So yeah, the Chinese (or Indian, or whatever) developers are loads cheaper than the old hands up in Redmond - but they can't easily replace something like the Office Suite. There's another problem as well. At present, the overseas shops don't seem to be doing anything that would make them more productive - which is how Japanese and German manufacturers made hay back in the 60s and 70s. Sure, someone will bring up CMM at this point.... and I'm sorry, but a shop that makes a fetish out of huge stacks of mandatory metrics in endless reporting streams may be a lot of things, but more productive isn't one of them.

Now, maybe if some of these enterprising overseas shops took note of dynamic languages and XP, they might get a critical leg up on the local guys. But no, so far it's the same exact curly brace languages and the massive overhead of CMM. Until that changes, I don't think MS has a whole heck of lot to worry about from that direction.