Blue Ocean Strategy & Open Source Technology

My latest project is Blue Ocean Strategy Createware, the only authorized practitioner's tool for Blue Ocean Strategy. Createware is an ongoing project that probably deserves an entire series of posts, though I'll start with one insight I had from a module we're just finishing.

First, some background. Createware is web-based software built entirely, by design, on open-source technology. That doesn't mean that we didn't use any proprietary software while building it but, rather, that none of those proprietary standards sneaked into the final product. For example, the team uses a collection of Windows and Macintosh workstations, and our servers run the standard open-source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP) stack. The interactive chart making modules are programmed in Flash, an open standard, though we used Adobe's proprietary tools for our design and compile cycles.

An insight I had is that open source may be the single best example of a Blue Ocean movement I can think of. Everything about the open-source movement seems to leap straight from the theory. For example, the core of the open-source movement is Value Innovation. Disparate groups of developers listened to customers and non-customers, fielded a list of key elements, then used the Four Actions Framework to decide what needs to be Eliminated, Reduced, Raised, & Created.

Besides applying the Four Actions Framework the open-source movement also embraces Fair Process and Tipping Point Leadership. There are gatekeepers that decide whose code goes in and whose gets left out: this is actually a well-defined structure. These gatekeepers make informed decisions and almost always let people know how they came to their decisions, and the decisions are usually relatively final. Similarly, decision makers exercise Tipping Point Leadership; a small and fluid group of extremely influential people lead by ability rather than fiat. There are no spoiled heirs here. Even the most influential leaders -- GNU founder Richard Stallman and Linux creator Linus Torvalds -- have found themselves uncomfortably marginalized within their own movements at times.

The mechanism that drives the Value Innovation process within the open-source movement isn't entirely clear, but it definitely exists. Let's take the flagship Linux Operating System as an example. For purposes of illustration, I'm focused on the OS in general, rather than any specific implementation. The development of Linux Eliminated monolithic control over the code-base, Reduced branding and marketing, Raised product quality and reliability, and Created a peer-review system.

These sound easy but at the time they represented a wildly different way to think. The Free Software Foundation (FSF)/Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) project brought us 90% of the way there, but by leaving in place the monolithic control the GNU group understandably, albeit irrationally, spooked corporate chieftains. Torvald's Linux removed this control; the downside is there are dozens of flavors of Linux but the upside is that a number of these flavors are supported by the software giants and -- with that support -- moved from being a marginal experiment to becoming the preeminent operating system of corporate data centers.

Just because the open-source model has been successful doesn't mean there are those that don't try to usurp it to some extent. One of the features of Createware is "Save to Power Point" but, remember, there are no Windows Servers involved. How do we do that? Using a relatively new technology called Office Open XML (OOXML) that allows people to write Office document without Office. What's the downside? OOXML is insanely complicated to work with compared to OpenDocument, a competing format widely endorsed but so far incompatible with native support for the widely deployed MS Office. Why would Microsoft allow us to do that? Cynics say they made the format so complicated that programmers decide it's not worth fiddling with and just use Windows and Office. I'm not ready to take either side, except to say that OOXML did seem unnecessarily cumbersome and the documentation was overwhelming, but -- to be fair to Microsoft -- there is a lot of genuine complexity involved in the underlying engineering issues.

Is OOXML an attempt to rein-in the Blue Ocean open standards before they trample Microsoft's red document preparation software and reduce it's utility to a commodity: a tool to bloody up the blue ocean of open source? That's a religious debate I'm not going to wade into, other than to say that it's nice to be able to save to PowerPoint natively. Why do I need to save to Power Point, as opposed to a different document format? Because that's what my customers demand. Why do they demand that? That's the eventual Achilles heel of open-source and probably a question best answered by a strategic consultant rather than an enthusiastic product developer.