1. An Open-Source-Centric Business Model One of the charms of open source is its inclusiveness. It accepts people with all kinds of intentions — the engineer obsessed with technology, the merchant with ulterior motives, the volunteer passionate about public welfare, even the casual bystander — all of them can collide and mingle here, forming a force.

In ToB Thinking at Large and Small Companies, I analyzed the ToB strategy of large companies in some detail; this post supplements the thinking on small companies’ ToB strategy from another angle. 1. What Is a ToB Service A commercial company usually maintains at least one value chain and makes its profit from it.

Adobe acquired Magento for $1.67 billion, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion — open source turns out to be a good business too. This article is mainly a record of, and some thoughts about, open source. 1. What Open Source Is 1.1 History In 1969, Bell Labs shared the Unix source code with the community, laying an important foundation for open source.

1. Understanding ToB It is only because money has become harder and harder to make from ToC that ToB has flourished. The era in which a single idea could be turned into a good product and ultimately accepted by everyone has been crushed beneath the wheels. In the early days of the internet, a single portal directory made Sohu, a single chat tool made Tencent, and even hao123 — nothing more than a handful of jump pages — sold for tens of millions.

1. IT Infrastructure Is Undergoing Drastic Change Traditional enterprises are building more efficient business models on top of internet technology to strengthen their competitiveness in their industries. Lower R&D costs, faster product iteration, closer proximity to customers, better service quality… This whole set of changes will push the productivity and living standards of society as a whole onto a new level.