competition

Design students don thinking caps for Electrolux Design Lab

Every year, students from all over the globe compete in the Electrolux Design Lab, a contest inviting budding designers to show off their best ideas for kitchen appliances that address the needs of consumers. Established in 2003, the Design Lab gives undergraduate and graduate industrial design students an opportunity to win cash prizes and a grand prize of $7,745 dollars. Winners also receive a six-month internship at one of Electrolux's global design centers.

Contestants are asked to submit designs that are two or three years out. the designs should focus on the needs of modern kitchens, innovative design, … Read more

Microsoft's annual report: Open-source mental block

In reading through Microsoft's annual report, I am struck by how far the company has come in appreciating the threat that open source brings to Redmond.

I'm also shocked by just how ill-informed the company continues to be with regard to open source as a business strategy. CEO Steve Ballmer has revealed this before in his quips, such as open source "doesn't pay the bills in this company." But here Microsoft has managed to enshrine its ignorance in a public document:

Our business model has been based upon customers paying a fee to license software … Read more

Red Hat's CEO finally "gets the joke"

Jim Whitehurst is hitting his stride as Red Hat CEO, and does himself proud in this excellent ZDNet interview. Whitehurst was COO at Delta Air Lines prior to joining Red Hat, adding credibility to his take on the enterprise software game:

I was a senior exec, and like every other senior exec I had a huge IT budget. Mine was as large as Red Hat's revenues last year. You sit there and say, "Why are my IT costs going up, but I'm getting less and less functionality?" Every IT professional says the same thing: my lights-on costs are going up. But wait a minute! I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up? I get the joke now.

If you look at the S&P 500, seven of the top twenty companies are tech, and other than Google, they're not high-growth. But they're just printing money because switching costs are so high. There's this incredible amount of residual goodwill to Red Hat because we're seen as an alternative to that. Oracle announced a 20-something percent price increase just as the economy starts heading south. How can you do that unless you're pretty sure nobody can switch? High switching costs led to infrastructure cost creep. Once you get hooked, you can't get off.

Bingo. In the case of Oracle, industry consolidation has put it into a position of such power over its customers that it has killed off much of its competition. IBM and others have done the same. Enterprises now get to choose between competing behemoths that have little incentive to lower prices.

Open source (and SaaS) may well be the only hope of bringing back meaningful competition to the enterprise software game. The problem, however, is that open source still lacks one trait that enterprise buyers, given their druthers, strongly prefer: Largesse. Who in open source can provide that security blanket?… Read more

Ixia kicks off competitive upgrade program

Ixia, a leading company in IP performance testing, announced a competitive upgrade program today as part of its "Switch to Ixia" campaign.

The program will last through the end of September 2008. During this time, new and existing customers from all over the world can trade equipment from Ixia's competitors, including Spirent, Agilent, and Shenick, in for Ixia's latest test equipment and applications. Or they can earn up to a 50 percent credit toward a new purchase.

Ixia also offers IxFinancing Leasing, a special financing solution that allows you to pay for Ixia products, software, and … Read more

Novell's welcome gift for Red Hat

The VAR Guy suggested that Novell should greet Red Hat's "invasion" of Boston next week with a little tea party of sorts. Well, I don't know that Novell has any such intentions in mind - it's a peace-loving company, after all - but I can reveal Novell's welcome banner for Red Hat Summit attendees:

All's fair in love and advertising....

As shown, Novell has hung banners and put 7x7 floor decals in the Prudential Center Mall in Boston. The Hynes Convention Center is connected to the Prudential Center Mall, as are the three … Read more

Ray Ozzie is afraid of open source, but why?

So, Ray Ozzie has gone on the record to suggest that open source could be a bigger threat to Microsoft than Google is. Savio isn't buying that line, and I'm not sure that I do, either.

Let's be clear about what Ozzie actually said:

...[O]pen source [i]s much more potentially disruptive [than Google].

Open source has disruptive potential. Google is disruptive now. Google is making money now in markets that Microsoft covets, while open source is not cutting into a single Microsoft revenue stream. Not one. Red Hat and Novell's SUSE are almost entirely eating away at the Unix market, while MySQL is creating new markets with web properties. Open source? It doesn't (today) make a dent in Office, Windows, XBox, Dynamics, etc.

So why is open source potentially so disruptive to Microsoft? Two reasons.… Read more

Nintendo offers taste of 'Major League Eating'

Who says huge global companies don't have a sense of humor? In the same week that Nintendo releases the highly anticipated Wii Fit, they tip the scales in the other direction with the promotion of Major League Eating: The Game. As an officially licensed title by the top league (hopefully the only league) in speed eating, well-recognized stars such as Joey Chestnut or Takeru Kobayashi will be playable characters. The WiiWare title is touted as a fighting game that "requires players to master a smorgasbord of offensive and defensive weapons including bites, burps, belches, mustard gas, and jalapeno … Read more

TopCoder's interesting twist on community-based development

An old friend from the open-source world, Ira Heffan, called me today about his company, TopCoder. Ira is a smart guy so I figured anything with which he was involved must be good.

And it is. At its most basic, TopCoder stages programming competitions, both for itself (that is, its direct consulting clients) and for third parties like Google. Companies hire TopCoder to stage competitions to build functionality for them (as well as to scout for new talent). TopCoder also provides consulting services and uses competitions to create the requested applications, and heavily reuses its portfolio of applications and components to drive down development costs.

As an example, TopCoder has its premier competition in Las Vegas next week at the 2008 TopCoder Open (May 12 through 15), hosting 120 finalists from 30 countries. $260,000 in prize money is on the line.

Ira told me that one developer made over $500,000 last year in TopCoder prize money. Not too shabby. This, coupled with recruiting interest from top companies means that developers may be winning themselves a new job, as well as a competition.

However, it's actually a lower-profile component of TopCoder's business that I find the most fascinating: Bug Races.… Read more

The coming two-horse race: Open source vs. Proprietary X

I had breakfast with Scott Switzer, CTO of OpenX, in New York yesterday, and spoke at Dave Rosenberg's MuleSource conference today, where I had the chance to talk with Dave, Larry Augustin, and others from the open-source world. One thing seems fairly clear to me:

Done right, most open-source companies face a two-horse race: the leading open-source vendor against the leading proprietary vendor.

Reality is not so clean, of course. There are still a range of leftover incumbents from software's heady days of big license fees, which will endure for some time. But these are easy fodder for the big proprietary companies to either mow down or acquire, and for open-source companies to undermine on their way to market penetration.

Good marketing leaves just two competitors standing. The reality is that there will be one (or, at most, two) strong open-source offerings duking it out with one (or, at most, two) strong proprietary offerings. Every time someone talks up Tibco in an article, you want the journalist remembering that MuleSource is on its heels. The same is true for all open-source projects.

With this in mind, here are some of the leading match-ups:… Read more