Comment by tomxor
4 years ago
This is an interesting perspective however only the most extreme examples given are convincing enough to be as truly adversarial as the author implies.
Using the articles very own examples, hardware seems to be attempting to commoditize software, and software seems to be attempting to commoditize hardware, the chain is bidirectional and long, there seems to be no clear rules. In the example of Sun and Ximian, it can be viewed as commoditizing or directly funding a non existent yet required comunterpart due to lack of in house expertise.
I suspect the reality of the majority of less visible chains of compliments are closer to symbiotic than parasitic - that intentional and extreme commoditization are the adversarial exceptions which are so large and monopolistic as to bias the landscape... even then as other commenters point out, those relationships don't appear to be sustainable long term, due to longer term negative side effects or a changing landscape.
> hardware ... commoditize ... software, software ... commoditize ... hardware ... no clear rules
we all win.
But it's not the reality though, ultimately software doesn't want to commoditize hardware, it wants to have choices, sure, but only for itself, so it can lock people in to a specific choice to sell it to people too and with high margins. Vice versa is true too, hardware wants to build software ecosystem around it, but in a such way that uses only its hardware, not other hardware. This is why wintel is a thing.
Only from a quick glance it appears that we all win, but really none of us can win from this. Worse, megacorps don't really compete with each other, their view on competition is pretty perverse, they "compete" as long as such "competing" doesn't eat into juicy high margin profits that exist only on monopolized markets, so it's more like dividing markets and forming oligopolies, but not commodotizing each other.