Wow … Ted is blogging and he didn’t even tell me!

I just read a post by Ted Haeger at Novell titled “When Innovation Runs Out” … it’s an interesting post.  There was one thing that hit me while reading it …

In his post, he quotes someone stating “Our objective is to produce an alternative, not a substitute.”
and I really like this.  It is important to see that even as an
“alternative” it is not necessarily a “replacement”.  The people
who believe that Linux and Open Source is somehow going to be the “rip
and replace” solution for Windows are fooling themselves.  I have
worked on large network and system migrations, and these are not small
undertakings.  Instead, IMHO, I believe that we are going to see
Linux and Open Source join existing networks, and begin to expand in
their adoption and use.

It
seems a common thought that users will “transition”, or “switch” from one solution
to another.  However it seems that this is seldom what
occurs.  It is a tough to get users to completely give up what
they had, and embrace *only* the new.  Instead, users will adopt a
new “abstraction” that provides them with more value … and the old
stuff and new stuff seem to move forward together.

Examples of this are that even though we embrace MP3, we still seem to
have a lot of CDs around.  Likewise, no matter how hard I work at
it … I still have some Windows machines around … and even a Novell server or two.

I believe that we are going to see more and more solutions built on top
of  powerful abstraction technologies … and the old stuff is
still going to be there for a long time.