January 28, 2010 12:10 PM PST
This is an interesting piece on the fragility of the relationship between Google and the open-source community. The question, though, goes far beyond Google.
With Oracle's acquisition of Sun being completed in this past week, there is quite a lot of uncertainty in the market and the community about the future of one of the most popular and widely-used open-source products - MySQL (which was owned by Sun, and for which Oracle - seeing it as a clear and direct competitor - has expressed significant disdain).
It also raises a question we've been asking for more than a decade: How important is an ecosystem to the success of a product, platform or company?
It was just about three years ago when you couldn't talk with anyone in the tech industry without hearing about their platform. 2007 and 2008 were the years of the platform. Maybe everyone was trying to mimic Google and Salesforce.com and others who were succeeding with platforms.
We don't hear that over-used word as much anymore, but the reality is that ecosystems are still critical to the success of most up-and-coming (and to a large extent, established) technologies and companies, and in open-source it's not formal agreements and established structure that makes the ecosystem, rather it's trust in the participants, both corporate and individual.
I'm not convinced that if Mozilla makes something else the default search tool for FireFox that it will kill Google (it will have an effect, but the degree maybe smaller than we'd like to hope).
But this points out one of the things that has is true about all businesses: without the partners and the ecosystem to make your offerings useful, you will not make it in the market.
Which leads to the question: did Google consider this - or if they did, did they get it right - when they made these decisions? And when you make seemingly-little decisions, are you considering the effect it will have on your ecosystem?