Duffbert's Random Musings

1 - I disagree somewhat with Ben's comment. Individuals can choose to use Firefox on their home computer, not their work computer. Enterprise organizations choose what software get's placed at the desktop as much as they choose enterprise collaboration solutions. What we're seeing is a lot of enterprises choose to install Firefox as the alternative, or move in that direction. That's a big shift.

Products like zimbra, or Novell's Hula, are becoming more commonplace, and as they become more commonplace, it will become much more difficult to justify the licensing structure that Microsoft and IBM have in place, especially as these products mature.

mySQL isn't going away, Apache certainly isn't (most widely used web server out there isn't it?), and neither are many of these open source products. They already have tons of customers, many of whom don't even realize that's what's being used on the backend, and that's the biggest point, isn't it?

2 - Jon, You have a valid point, but I guess I didn't make mine clearly enough. Even in a larger enterprise, small numbers of test users can be switched to Firefox with no impact on other users. Thus, a controlled pilot is much easier. The issue with enterprise collaboration is that, unless interaction between those on it and those off it is seamless, it is very hard to have a controlled pilot that tells you much. Even switching one server to a different web server is no bid deal to accomodate, but collaboration is all about people working together, so if they can't, it makes testing and gradual acceptance more difficult.

This is not to say that these products won't or can't gain acceptance, but it does mean that that acceptance is likely to start with smaller customers and move to bigger customers, because a smaller customer (with 100 users, for example) can choose to switch all of them at once to a different form of collaboration. Once there is a fair amount of acceptance, the larger enterprise will start to desiginate a more autonomous group to use the technology and so on, but it makes the road to acceptance longer and harder than with Firefox or apache or thsoe sorts of products. That is all I meant to indicate.

3 - Yes, but every individual can decide to use Firefox or not, which is hardly the case with an enterprise collaboration product. That is a huge hurdle to overcome.

4 - Good point, Ben...