Re: Database market share 2004

Stu Charlton wrote:
> > The number of downloads is probably a better measure of the influence
> > of open source products. Trying to use capitalization or revenue as a
> > yardstick is problematical.
>
> Agreed, but arguably "number of downloads" is moreso. I remember back
> during the dot-com boom, that was how ISVs measured their success.
> Didn't get them very far...

The first example that comes to mind is the Java Developer Kit. Because it was a free download, you couldn't look to Sun financials for "JDK sales" as an accurate measure of Java adoption. In the ramp-up period for Java, Sun regularly publicized the number of JDK downloads as a measure of Java's growing popularity.

> > The economic effect of open source isn't limited to direct revenue from
> > licenses and support contracts. Companies that manufacture computers
> > know that open source contributes to the revenue stream from selling
> > hardware (e.g., 40 million web servers running Apache).
>
> Great, but since the only major integrated hardware & software
> companies are Sun & IBM, that's a rather limited set of companies.

Your integrated hardware & software company list is too narrow. For
example, HP's quarterly revenue from software was $277 million. That's
$205 million more than Borland's most recent quarterly revenue.

The more fundamental question is why you'd want to use an "integrated hardware & software company" prism when looking at the effect of open source software on hardware revenues.

Not every organization buying hardware to run Linux and Apache web server will limit its vendor choices to only IBM and Sun because they are integrated hardware and software companies.

> Whither the ISV? What happens to Oracle, Symantec/Veritas, BEA, etc?

Open source clearly has a different impact on software companies than on hardware vendors. If you're selling Xeon server boxes and RAID farms, your revenue isn't likely to decline if there's a net gain of 6 million in the number of users of the Linux/Apache/JBoss combination.

On the other hand, if you're selling application server software, the Linux/Apache/JBoss combo is a threat. Look at BEA's numbers for 2003 and 2004:

http://www.sqlsummit.com/Trends/AppServerMarket.htm Received on Sat Jun 04 2005 - 16:07:21 CDT