I’m attending a talk by Chris DiBona at Google today. The event is free and open to the public, but you need to sign-up in advance (unfortunately sign-ups are closed at this point).

I bring it up because Read/Write Web did an intriguing interview with Chris. My favorite question:

Q: Are their any commercial applications, which you believe are especially vulnerable to an open source competitor emerging?

A: I think that vulnerable is the wrong word. Here’s how I think of it: if a commercial entity finds that they can no longer sell their software because a viable open source project has risen to displace them, they really have to decide if they want to start selling services around the open source offerings or get out of that particular line of business. IBM has done a terrific job of the former.

Of course, Chris is right: IBM has done a terrific job of transitioning to the services market, and even endorsing open source alternatives in the process (Eclipse, GNU-Linux, etc). But, what’s more interesting to me is the lack of companies that are failing to make this transition, except one: Microsoft.

Another Read/Write Web article points out Microsoft’s failure to adapt to open source. Microsoft has been losing market share of internal products for years to Firefox, Apache, MySQL, GNU-Linux, etc. What about other failures? Perhaps Borland (falling to GCC and Eclipse), or was Borland more of a victim of Microsoft’s MSDN initiatives than open source? It’s amazing how terrible Microsoft is at adapting to open source competitors, and yet there are so few other companies fighting in the same futile way. Other companies threatened by open source (Sun, Novell, IBM, Apple, etc) have adapted and even embraced, transitioning as Chris DiBona outlined.

I hope Chris talks more about how open source is shaping software markets tonight. If anyone else is attending, drop me a line.