How woolly has your thinking got?
How much benefit did your business gain from you latest operating system upgrades? For the sake of having to upgrade perfectly functional computer systems, what productivity gains did you see for your investment?
How much better can you serve your customers now your staff have pretty see-through boxes on their screens and nothing is in the same place any more?
What about when you found out that all of your word processing and spreadsheet software had to be upgraded because not only had the format changed in the new version, but the extensions had been changed too? And then once the pain of all that was over, realising that nothing in that software was in the same place any more either?
How much did your 'enterprise' software cost you?
Did it sting when you realised that, not only did you have to pay through the nose to buy the licences, you also had to pay for installation and training and then pay again every year for the privilege of keeping it installed?
How much fun was the first twelve months after you installed it, when you had to break the way you do everything to fit the software?
Other than the initial efficiency gains - is it providing any long-term strategic advantage to your business, given that all your competitors are running the same software?
Nothing like murdering a metaphor - but the proprietary software industry is so far past it's prime, and yet remains so pervasive in our businesses, that we must collectively have our heads stuffed with wool.
We seem to have developed a sheep-mentality - if the whole flock is going in a certain way, most of us seem to follow. We've stopped questioning why we do the things we do.
The true innovators of the Internet age realise that proprietary software has it's place, but in areas where it really counts, proprietary software is too restrictive and it just gets in the way of building a leading business (could you imaging Google surviving if they had to pay licence fees for each of the tens of thousands of servers they have out there?).
Simply put, if you are a sheep there are only two eventual outcomes - you will get fleeced or eaten.
However likely you think this eventuality is, the pragmatist should recognise that there is a lot of merit to a basic set of tools that allow you to modify them to suit the way you do business.
For clarity - proprietary software is traditional, closed-source software. You pay for the licence to use (an) executable binary file(s). You never own it. You have no control over how it is written, or what features are included. You also have nothing to fall back on if the company decides to stop supporting the software or goes broke.
This has nothing to do with commercial software - although much of the current commercial software is proprietary. Paying for software and services that add value to your business makes sense. A lot of enterprise open-source applications are also partially or wholly supported by commercial versions of the software.
The majority of enterprise grade open-source applications are robust, stable and feature-rich. They are written in well supported programming languages and most have a lively and helpful support community such that you never have to worry about the 'company' going broke.
Nothing in business is a walk up start - the path for those who break away from the flock is challenging - but those who capitalise on what they do best and build a system and infrastructure suit, instead of just doing what everyone else is doing, have a far better chance of being ahead of the wolves in the end.
