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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nnillionaire who wrote (478)	2/25/1999 4:01:00 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

But this term simply seems like an oxymoron. Yeah, it sure does, doesn't it? If its open, how can it be proprietary? The word open has become a source of confusion in high tech because vendors in the Unix community have tried to make it the opposite of proprietary. When used in this way, open means committee controlled. In hypergrowth markets, the first goal of market development strategy is to eliminate bottlenecks to growth. The most rapidly proliferating architectures have proved to be proprietary and open. This is cribbed from Moore's book. This is the advantage that Microsoft has over Unix. Many venders can develop products for the market in parallel. IBM insisted that Intel license its 8086 chip architecture to second sources, although Intel resisted the idea; in the end this proved a boon to Intel's own growth. The market grew incredibly fast, thereby institutionalizing Intel's architecture as a de facto standard.

To: nnillionaire who wrote (478)	2/26/1999 9:01:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Dennis, I don't have the time to wade through all the messages to find Lindy's (and others') response to your question, so please forgive me if this is a repeat. Help me understand the term, ..."It controls proprietary open architecture..." First of all, this is not at all off-topic. It is totally germaine to the issues of gorillas. And it's confusing to those who haven't read the book (and potentially confusing to those who have read it), so it's well worth discussing. For most who haven't read the book, a proprietary open architecture is indeed an oxymoron, as you suggested. The book offers a different view. The authors' suggest that there are two types of architectures, open and closed. The open architecture is the IBM PC and the closed architecture was the Apple PC (until a couple years ago when Apple tried too late to promote clones.) Beyond that, both the open and closed architectures can be proprietary. Using the examples above, both are proprietary. An example of an open architecture that is not propietary is the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) architecture. It's a standard architecture established by an association and is supported by virtually every sound card in computers, MIDI piano keyboards, music notation software, etc. Hope this helps. --Mike Buckley