Globalization may be a problem or a blessing, in any case it is clear that small companies have a hard time trying to compete with big companies and as IT industry evolves and becomes more mature there are bigger companies and bigger amounts of money involved, so creating something revolutionary in a garage becomes harder and harder.
If that’s a bad thing because people don’t have those opportunities or it is a good thing because those opportunities and harder ones are being exploited and reaching consumers much faster is something I’ll leave to your opinion. But I would like to put Google as an example of one of those big companies and how the synergy that appears in those cases makes this phenomenon even more important.
On one side we have aspects related with branch visibility, marketing and the hard time that a small company may have to get this renown. Due to this big companies may present products worse than the competitors, but due to the renown get more attention from the consumers. For example the DNS service from google is apparently worse than open DNS.
This may actually play on favor of smaller companies if they are fast enough, as it happened with youtube and google video, it was too late for google and all the users were already using youtube. We will see what happens in the future with the social networks and initiatives from google like buzz. Despite of that youtube was bought by google, again if this is good or bad I’ll leave it to your opinion, but the purpose of small garage companies may be just to get bought by bigger companies (if you can’t beat’em, join’em) and globalization (problem or blessing) is presented as unstoppable.
On the other hand, big companies may develop different services that come together, allowing them to offer more complex services with greater functionality at a relatively low cost, which is one of the best examples I can think of how synergy may happen. For example google has been offering a service to translate pages and text for some time, with an update the translation became real-time, no big deal in principle. At the same time, google offers videos in youtube (and google video), and launches a service to include automatic captions, which is a very nice service, but when combined with real time translation it is even nicer. When you combine this with android and mobile phones, then you can get real-time voice translation on your mobile phone. That belongs to the real of Sci-Fi at this point in time, but google is making many efforts in different areas that converge to great applications like this. The same could be said with many other companies.
Small companies can tackle the small problems, but they can’t get into the big problems that can only be faced when using this synergy and efforts focused on the “sub-problems”. This phenomenon is pushing some developers towards the open source alternatives, that allow in a similar way to integrate many different aspects to offer a greater final product. I still have a very superficial, if any, knowledge about the dynamics in open source projects and the reasons that lie behind those projects, setting aside projects with public funds, so I’ll not comment any more on that.
How is this relevant? It is not, but I try to have a post every week :P It is interesting (for me) to see what is google doing, as it is a reference for people working in IT, it is also interesting (for me again) the emergent properties as synergy that appear on many systems. It is just a personal fascination for emergence, and the post was fitting with the next group I’ve planned, the long delay in posting has caused groups to be formed and the best is always left for the end.
