Ng: Business case for proprietary systems

Friday, July 15, 2011

LAST week, I had a chance to visit some technology incubators in Manila. These are managed by a government agency and it is worthwhile that these facilities exist and are operated. The presence of tech incubators in the US and in many parts of the world, as well as great universities, has always been the harbinger of great tech companies. Incubators also provide the initial convenience as well as the mentoring and the environment that encourages entrepreneurship.

I was a little bit disconcerted, though, when they told me that they prefer their locators to be on open source technologies. Why? I would reckon that if you want to encourage entrepreneurship, you would choose on the basis of whether that business model has the most chance of being able to succeed and make it big in the market. However, by its very business nature, open source can be something that is cheaper and easier to start up but you don’t see the success rate as being better.

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Now, before people I know start raising their voices, I do admit that I have a business interest. For the last 25 years, I have been using a lot of Microsoft technology and have actually two businesses that are certified gold partners of it. I have been for some years an official Microsoft tech evangelist.

However, on a more personal level, I do blog using open source system and I can say that so far, WordPress, an open source platform, is probably still the best blogging tool. I also tinker with a lot of smart phones and gadgets based on Linux, Android, Blackberry OS, Apple IOS and Web OS and have found some of them to be really impressive.

But the reason you should also encourage people to develop on Apple IOS or Microsoft .NET or even Oracle or IBM Websphere technologies is simple – there is a lot of demand for it and people and businesses are willing to pay for it.

These are companies that have developed and marketed the technology and have gained credibility. Many businesses are convinced of their reliability and trustworthiness. Not only have these vendors built a market, they have actually built up an ecosystem that makes it easier for somebody inside that system to be successful.

Let us choose another analogy. Let us say that you want entrepreneurs and one of the best way to encourage them is just to ask them to franchise Jollibee. Then you are in business. But people will come in and say, wait! Why do you have to throw expensive money to pay them? We can’t afford that. Why not make your own hamburger?

But there is a reason you want to franchise and the most important thing is that Jollibee is not just about making burgers. It is about taking advantage of a brand that already has customers. It is about creating a store that already has systems and processes.

It is about buying a service management system that allows you to actually produce, cook, sell and package a few thousand burgers with only a handful of people.

There is a reason we need to be sensitive to market demands, and produce for them, instead of trying to dictate to the market.

There is a very simple reason we should encourage, for instance, people to develop using Microsoft and other proprietary technologies – because it is easier and faster to be trained on it. And after you are certified, you can easily find so many companies who are looking for such a skill.