Group items tagged

Business Ecosystems

James F. Moore in 1993

Today, "ecosystem leaders" are generally referred to as "keystone organizations". Keystone organizations can be large or small, complex or simple, and include not-for-profit or commercial for-profit organizations. Commercially oriented keystone organizations are the most dominant and most successful in terms of economic value created as a whole and for ecosystem members. Examples of commercial keystone organizations include large companies such as eBay, Google and Apple. Not-for-profit keystone organizations are less common and are emergent. Examples of not-for-profit keystone organizations include the Eclipse Foundation, Joomla, Drupal, the Mozilla Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Open Group.

Open-source software often gets derided for its downsides—maintenance concerns, the need for development resources, concerns about security—but its huge transparency and collaboration benefits typically get missed.

(It’s worth noting that you may be using open-source software without realizing it: Most major content management systems, including WordPress and Drupal, are based on open-source code bases. Not that you’d immediately think of them in that context.)

Open source tends to follow current standards. The reason Mozilla Firefox gained so much momentum on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer about a decade ago has everything to do with programming strategy. IE, being proprietary and without much competition, didn’t have a reason to keep innovating quickly. Firefox, on the other hand, was in a spot to iterate relatively quickly and drive online development—and when Google Chrome came into the picture, this process moved even faster. This is true of a lot of open-source software. It can ensure you’re working with this year’s model.

As for Flash, the change in Chrome's behavior is just another cut that's making the security-flaw-ridden platform less relevant and, hopefully, soon obsolete.