At yesterday’s Aula 2006 event here in Helsinki, Clay Shirky opined that a major advantage of the open source ecosystem is the way in which cost of failure is borne by the individual failing, rather than by the community as a whole. In other words, creating a failing piece of software doesn’t hurt the open source community the way it hurts a company, and this gives an edge to open source.
I’m not sure if Shirky is really comparing apples to apples here — it seems to me that the “capitalist ecosystem”, like indeed any ecosystem, has this exact same advantage. Anyway, the practical side of his point, as described by Bruno Giussani, is that
Organizations that want to encourage innovation should focus on reducing the cost of failure rather than focusing on minimizing its likelihood, as most companies do today.
One way companies are heeding this advice is by embracing the Perpetual Beta — even commercial applications are now often released as, basically, proof of concepts, and only the apps that are proven to be popular will then receive the polish typical of the yesteryear’s “1.0.”
We at MK&C first embraced this approach with Pyro, which we released as Beta 1 after only about two weeks of work. Since then, though, Pyro has proven to be popular enough to be a reasonable investment and accordingly we’ve spent the time needed to polish it. So, without further ado, introducing Pyro 1.0!
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