read it at : http://www.technetra.com/writings/archive/2007/08/11/doing-a-web20-startup-with-open-source
He speaks of avoiding a vendor lock in when using open source. This would be good for the customers and perhaps good for the turnover but not for the revenue of the vendor itself.
How is his business model, when he wants to have business customers?
Also other blogs and analysts speak of the opposite, that Web 2.0 suites and applications lead to a vendor lock in, also when using open source. Normally nobody and also no company will find it necessary to give personal data to every web 2.0 page they use. It is written from all industry analysts, that the customers expect suites from the big vendor and not want to use 10 different tools for wikis, blogs, IM, rss, Newsfeeds, etc..
They want to build mashups using rss if the need extra services and so only one page or vendor has a contract with them , other services will be used for free and so e.g. twitter everybody uses via rss and so an advertisment based model will not work for them and. Ok, I read something that Microsoft also want to establish an ad based model for office (!?) but definitely only to compete with Google and not because they like to do that.
Also on other pages the employees also would share data via social networks e.g. via plaxo, but who is using the homepage in the end? They all use the RSS function to stay in touch with each other. Unclear at the moment if the customers are want to pay a price per month, or only for an prof edition or more likely to see advertisment. Perhaps different pages will use different models, like most of the private social networks like myspace use ads and prof networks like xing use premium services.. But in the end all need an open api (facebook) or interface to integrate/use data from competitor pages otherwise the customer will complain. Nobody from the big mass of people wants to be signed in on every page. If the vendor forbid change data, this it could loose market share, if it allows it, the company loose money. So the lock in effect decide also how successful the company will be. Some of them will bet to stay and lock the people if the have enough like myspace but others will only survive, when open its platform. Like many traditional vendors changed to OSS business models not to disapear from the market, due to cost pressure and declining revenues. But in the end using open source software like the famous LAMP stack for the web 2.0 website will be exellent to save money in the beginning. So the company itself avoid vendor lock in through open source but tries to reach a successful vendor lock in effect respectively a monopol and market niche with their own strategy on the market to be successful. Interesting which strategies of the web 2.0 platform will succeed in the end and if some of them will change to a 3D surface in future when the virtual worlds get more successful, open source stacks definitely will survive the next moves in web also Saas movement lead to higher usage of LAMP stacks
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