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Everything that can be a commodity, will be a commodity

March 28, 2006 - 12:15pm — yelvington

Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation, says the era of packaged commercial software is coming to an end, because open-source alternatives are wiping out the market: "All of your software will be free. It means that, over time, you aren't going to be paying for software anymore but will instead pay for assistance with it."

I see a lesson for newspapers in the open-source software phenomenon. Everything that can be a commodity, will be a commodity. General news has passed that point. To understand where and how we create value, we must discard the notion that news has inherent commercial value -- it doesn't. Value comes into play when we focus on how and why people use information. What jobs are people trying to accomplish? How can we make that process work better? Opportunities are waiting to be discovered.

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