RedMonk’s analytical foundations, part 1: 2003–2005

Since RedMonk is turning 10 this week, I wanted to add my own contribution. While Steve talked about some of our best predictions, I’m going to talk about some of what I see as RedMonk’s foundational works, which continue to define our philosophy and approach today.

To collate this list, I’ve read everything that everyone at RedMonk has ever published. If you thought that would take a long time, you’d be absolutely right. If you read all of these links as well as those in the next posts in the series, let me know and I’ll happily buy you a beer (or the beverage of your choice) next time I see you.

2003

• “Sun puts a price on Orion” on simplicity applied to pricing and distribution
• “Go Charter Communications!” on vendor integrity, trust, and data privacy

2004

• “Language is a utility: so use it!” on messaging clarity over marketing “launches”
• “On Java, Mono, and desktop applications” and “What SOA really means — a customer perspective” on avoiding lock-in, network effects, and more (follow-up on PaaS lock-in six years later).
• “Microsoft goes cheap cheap, gets simple?” on deploying with the same platform you develop on and democratizing development
• “BEA, SOA, UML” on service-oriented architecture, which has come around anew with Amazon’s and the broader industry’s focus on APIs.
• “Becoming LinuxWorld” on companies’ need to embrace (and possibly extend) open source.
• “On ‘food solutions,’ IT marketing and the software cookbook” on the corporate creation of new in-house technologies and differentiating on top (follow-up by Steve six years later applying this to open source [e.g. Hadoop, Cassandra]).
• “Microsoft matures as IBM once did” on the value of long-term, senior engineers (i.e. 20-30 years experience, not 20-30 years old)
• “Nice to see Linus is as flawed as the rest of us” observes that Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome is not exclusive to proprietary software.
• “Swainson: Early days but signs are good” explaining how marketing often trumps technical prowess.
• “On attestation, transparency, Microsoft internal choices and the future of market research” foreshadowing some of our later work on RedMonk Analytics and data sharing with e.g. New Relic and Jaspersoft.
• “The pub is the place (for creativity and innovation)” on the social side of innovation.

2005

• “All hail the new simplicity” on barriers to entry, a common problematic theme across the entire tech industry (with follow-ups on frictionless computing, on managers finally understanding the new kingmakers five years later, and on bottom-up adoption‘s effects on procurement six years later).
• “Home is where the work is” on working remotely, a topic that remains contentious today.
• “It takes a community” on the importance of building a community around your software.
• “Transparency: The new default” on doing design, launches, and development more openly.
• “If I could be like Mike…er, Apache” on the potential of the Apache foundation, which was catapulted to even more prominence in the wake of the cloud and Big Data (follow-up on Github vs Apache six years later).
• “The best things on the Web aren’t free” on the need for business models in Web startups.
• “‘Open source community’ is just muddled thinking” on the heterogeneity of open-source communities.
• “Enterprises and consumers don’t buy things, they subscribe to things” on the coming service-based economy — a precursor to IaaS, API management, etc.
• “Wake up to the long tail of passion and plug-ins” on the value of extensibility in attracting a community.
• “Note to world: There is money in commodities” explains that commoditization does not force anyone up the stack if there’s other value they can provide at that level, such as brand.
• “IBM to Google: Come eat our lunch?” on data gravity.
• “Tomayko’s zero sum law of net success” on the need to have haters of what you do if you want to have fans of it — nobody will buy your software if nobody cares about it.
• “On Lotus and the advantages of componentization” on breaking down your software into component building blocks. Amazon took advantage of this strategy in the context of web services, as we wrote four years later.
• “For Microsoft Live to work, fire the soap powder marketers” on teaching companies the need for interoperability and openness unlike what many non-software industries require.