The New Pirates -- From Arpanet to Internet to Web 3.0
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Sign In We are living through a revolutionary time where old media is collapsing around us as new media grows out of the weeds of the past. This talk traces the steps we have taken and takes some predictions of what might lie ahead. Drawing from Deborah Spar, author of “Ruling the Waves,” and Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” the speaker, with additional insight, will address how Open Source fits the model of a disruptive technology and what that might mean to users of Drupal.
A strategy for Open Source is to compete against non-consumption by moving into unserved and underserved markets which the big, integrated, competitors won’t bother with.
The history of technological disruption is for technology firms to move into markets that seem to be invisible to the big players — markets that aren’t on their “radar.”
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Focus of the talk
I don’t want to switch the name of this talk at this late stage. What I would like to present is how Drupal has gone from serving small undemanding users toward serving larger, enterprise-level users. When I first started to work with Drupal in 2005, I heard folks say that Drupal was “brittle.” It did not “scale well.” Well, if it were ever true, it isn’t true any more.
Clayton Christensen in “Innovator’s Dilemma” shows how tomorrow’s market leaders start in undemanding niches that over time come in and displace the market leaders, often seen in the beginning as “not quite good enough,” the disruptive technology (such as open source) takes root and grows in unexpected ways. Often times competing against non-consumption. For example, the first transistor radios did not replace the large floor models of our parents or grandparents, but were purchased by teens who could finally listen to the songs they wanted to, albeit with not as good a sound as on the parent’s sets, but it was that or nothing.
Today’s high-end websites are dominated by large closed source solutions, but their dominance is beginning to slip as open source in general and Drupal especially is getting better and better and it is able to more cost-effectively do the bigger jobs. Companies that wanted websites and got sticker-shock at $1M+ websites can now get into the game with far less up-front investment.
It used to be asked, “is Drupal ready for prime time?” Well, it’s not being asked any more. It’s a fact, and one which this talk will explore in more depth.