Having had a minor background in computer technologies, I’ve dealt with open source software and loved it. There are so many possibilities involved in it’s development, if you want something in the software, you add it. It’s as simple as that. Open source software is just as simple as it’s name, the program comes with the source code attached and anyone is open to change it. Sometimes open source software can also be known as freeware with the exception that some freeware does not include the source code. In other words all open source software is freeware but not all freeware is open source, kind of like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.
In the book the subject of the GNU/Linux operating system arises which has to be the most well known open source software/firmware that there could be and consists mainly of open source software that allows someone to manage their computer environment almost for free. The only problem that someone runs into with GNU/Linux is if you create your own problem there’s not many computer shops that could fix it, you’re on your own. Some of us like it that way, most people wouldn’t play with Linux if they weren’t up to the challenge.
Now I believe commercial software will always have it’s place, not because there’s more money to develop it or because there will always be someone who can fix a problem (which usually takes a while before a request gets attention). The real reasons that commercial software will always have it’s place are clearly stated in the book but not applied to the discussion about commercial software. The major problem that the development of the internet ran into was the lack of compatibility and standards, the same applies to commercial software. Personally my word processing program is Pages which is a commercial piece of software, the reason I use it? Simplicity and I’ve found it has everything I need in it. The only problem I’ve run into is that the standard for word processing happens to be .doc* files which means when uploading documents to various places I am forced to export into a .doc* file so that almost anyone can download it and read it. I can’t tell you how frustrating it can be to have accidentally uploaded a .pages* file. Through this example though, we see that any word processing program now needs to be capable of exporting to a .doc* file to be able to be read on almost any computer. If you know computers you know that that standard was set by Microsoft through it’s commercial program, Microsoft Word. Another reason that commercial software will always have it’s place would be simply that many people don’t want to do the work to find a program that works for them, instead they look to a large well known company to develop something that they can conform to and learn.
Many of those well known companies have conformed to a standard of their own to get work done efficiently and cost effectively. This standard is to outsource, outsourcing is allowing large and even small companies to get minor work done quite cheaply and quickly giving them a greater margin for profit. The book mentions quite a few times that a lot of this work can be done while most of the people in the US that manage those companies are sleeping because this work is being done on the other side of the world. This system has allowed many companies to be working and making money 24/7. One of the benefits that Friedman talks about is the ability to free up minds in the US to pursue greater developments so we continue to evolve and gain new technologies. This is actually becoming a fact as we are seeing more and more people going back to school, many of whom are going for a major in a computer technology field. Before reading this book outsourcing was always an idea that I found to be negative and I see the negative effects it can have because I do work in a call center. When I transfer to my technical support office it isn’t uncommon to have the customer become upset because they don’t want to talk to someone from the Philippines. The reasons behind this could be that they think they won’t be able to understand the agent on the line, that they are in support of having Americans do the same job, or they themselves have had a bad experience with outsourcing. Some of the small effects of this can be that a company can lose customers because they do outsource. Overall outsourcing can be a very good thing but there can be minor consequences to companies that do depending on the type of outsourcing being done.
Now outsourcing wouldn’t have been at all possible without workflow software even with the ability to connect with those countries we in the US use for outsourcing the work needing to be done would be too complicated to be done on the other side of the world. In the US we were struggling within our own offices to get work done because of the gap in systems communications. Workflow software bridged that gap allowing companies to have a way to integrate their systems to allow easy communication between departments. Without the development of a common language that almost any computer could easily understand and do the work that needed to be done at that step and then passing the information along to the next department we’d still be running companies that end up being isolated to one building. The development of workflow software allows me to take a customers call and determine what needs to be done and then pass the work to another background department and move onto the next call. As an example at my work I can write an order and that order goes to my order writer’s department to be inputted into the billing, services, and dispatch departments so that a bill will be generated as the customer receives service, the services department is told to do the work to allocate the services that the customer is purchasing, and finally the dispatch department can put the physical work onto a technician’s schedule. All of this work could even be being input by someone halfway across the world because work flow software has given us the ability to give them a system that understands the work that I originally did.
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