Dan sent me the following:

I read the link you gave to The Innovator's Dilemma. It reminded me of an interview with Brian Joffe (CEO of the wildly successful Bidvest group) that I read a few days ago:
“Bidvest is a very, very decentralised organisation, and as long as we can provide an environment and fertile soil for small entrepreneurs to work in a reasonably small environment, I think that makes us extremely competitive and extremely difficult to compete against.”...Joffe explained the structure of his business, “Ours are what we call business units and they are profit centres, and each one of those businesses are run by entrepreneurs. So they are small business entrepreneurs and the skills that we need in order to manage our businesses are generated by those entrepreneurs.”

Jared Diamond gave a talk titled "HOW TO GET RICH". In this he makes the point that he believes that lots of competing, but communicating, units are the path to success. I interpret Clayton Christensen to echo this message. And it would seem that Brian Joffe has taken this message to heart!

Also of interest, in this interview Buzz Bruggeman claims that he finds that Microsoft's units do not talk to each other. At the same time I have heard that Microsoft does not intend to bring its Small Business Accounting product into New Zealand for quite a few years yet because there is too much localisation involved for such a small market. 

I believe that Bill Gates has read and praised both of these books, so I find these tidbits of information to be rather odd. I now find myself wondering about the amount of competition and communication on the go in the open source community - can closed source actually compete in the long term?

8:00:35 PM