tech decentral

The Web decentralizes knowledge production.
Open source demarketizes proprietary software business models.
Social media tools disintermediate traditional information sources.

and…

RedMonk disrupts the industry analyst business.

That’s one reason I’m joining RedMonk. Together we can be even more disruptive, in a productive way. But the disruption itself isn’t as interesting as what happens next. What comes after the disruption and destruction and dissolving of the old ways of doing? Constructing new ways of creating value and remodeling the old ways. That’s where the real work happens. That’s where RedMonk comes in: helping technology companies find ways to thrive and profit as trends in technology look like they’re taking every profit-making opportunity away.

After Disruption

Cote’ has his mind maps, Steve his Q&As, and James his stream of consciousness mental mashups. I like bullet points and bolded text with references to Eastern and Western philosophy.

After enlightenment, the laundry. That’s a Zen saying that means this: don’t think that enlightenment–nirvana–changes your life and takes you away to some heavenly place where you either don’t have any work to do or you’re in so much bliss that the work doesn’t burden you. Nirvana isn’t a resting place or a destination. Nirvana is seeing reality for what it is, being present here and now, accepting whatever happens, and getting on with the work that needs to be done. It means doing the laundry with attentiveness, no matter how many loads there are, no matter what awful stains you find, no matter how much you hate folding shirts.

RedMonk is enlightened. James, Steve, and Cote’ see and understand the changes that are happening in the technology industry. But Redmonk’s enlightenment (like RedMonk’s disruptiveness) is not the only thing that’s important about what they’re doing. Being enlightened just creates a basis for the work that needs to be done. Disruption leaves only chaos if you don’t build something new afterwards.

After enlightenment–and after disruption, decentralization, value destruction–what happens? The hard work of figuring out how to successfully create value in an ongoing, sustainable way. Software and web services still need to be designed, built, and sold (or maybe provided free), then deployed and supported. That’s where RedMonk comes in, with practical insight for success, for information systems vendors and users alike.

Pragmatic Enlightenment

I suspect it’s relatively easy to write about the difficult trends facing information technology vendors today and it’s reasonably easy to keep doing business as usual. It’s not easy, though, to deeply understand those trends and then figure out ways of responding to them in productive ways. That is pragmatic enlightenment, enlightenment firmly fixed in reality.

You can imagine a monk, or perhaps a nun, sitting lotus position under a tree in blissful nirvana, completely unaware of worldly needs–this is like the blogger who knows and sees the trends but has no plan or interest in taking action based on them or who critiques whatever she sees but offers no better solution. Alternatively, think of a laborer who completes whatever work appears each day, but fails to understand the larger trends that will make his work obsolete or worthless before too long–this is the software developer who keeps on churning out new offerings that assume that the same old architectures and licensing schemes and business models will continue to bring profit in perpetuity.

Pragmatic enlightenment combines both wisdom and action: a working monk or a working nun, an enlightened and aware laborer.

As examples of pragmatic enlightenment, consider these classic articles from the RedMonk analysts:

• Steve’s Biggest Community Wins on why he is not biased towards open source but rather towards software with the biggest community–he’s no kneejerk open source apologist
• Coté arguing that agile methods should work with dysfunctional organizations, or what’s the point?
• James suggesting how transparency can promote business success in On Open Source, Declarative Living and Making Better Platform Decisions.

So why RedMonk? Because there’s some laundry that needs to be done.