Ganar la competencia contra el FLOSS

A través de la lista de Solar (castellano) me entero de un artículo “Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects” (de Deishin Lee y Haim Mendelson) que analiza cómo dar batalla en los mercados contra productos / servicios basados en FLOSS y en redes comunitarias. El artículo también se estuvo discutiendo en slashdot. Según la reseña y parte de una entrevista a los autores:

“One solution: “Divide and conquer,” says Haim Mendelson, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers Professor in the Graduate School of Business. Commercial firms, he says, have three levers to gain competitive advantage when they compete with a free product: Timing, product features, and the skillful use of network effects across market segments. … A recent paper on this topic by Mendelson, coauthored with Deishin Lee, PhD ’04, now a faculty member at Harvard Business School, is not a how-to manual for hard-pressed executives. Rather the researchers have built a theoretical model explaining the choices open to commercial firms. “Although open source is the lead example of our work, the principles certainly apply to other businesses, including, for example, the media business,” says Mendelson.”