Limits and NetworksΒΆ
We put limits on the growth of OpenGeo, for two reasons. The first is to open wider possibilities and opportunities for others - creating a network of opportunity instead of a single organization dominating. The second is selfish - working for a 50 person company is a lot more fun than a 500 person company.
Limiting ourselves to Geospatial Software certainly puts some constraint on our growth, but there are companies that just do geospatial and have thousands of employees. Though we compete with these in the market we plan to compete more by building a flexible, agile network of allies. We don’t want our allies and partners to be threatened by us potentially jumping in to a profitable niche that they find. Instead we want to be able to support and encourage them, to further innovation. Some of these allies may be incubated by OpenGeo, but spun off as their own independent entity. At some point we may split OpenGeo along some logical lines so that each unit can have more control and autonomy. This should allow each organization to take bigger chances than they would as a division of a larger company. Different organizations may form strong partnerships and symbiotic relationships with one another. But an important point of keeping them separate is that they are allowed to die. Each must compete in the market and get market feedback, instead of being a big corporate division that continues to exist and become more bureaucratic with inertia. A vein of successful business ideas will lead to several 30-50 person organizations that form amoeba like, each breaking off from the core when it can support itself. Some of these may be very co-dependent, like breaking out a killer design or marketing team in to its own company, specializing in geospatial user experience. Their primary client would still be OpenGeo, but others in the market would also be able to use their services. This in some ways is extending good, modular open source software design to the world of business - each unit should be able to be used by others.
More likely in the short term than breaking out a team would be a partner of OpenGeo focusing on a particular domain and finding great success. This could be as an awesome services business, that builds amazing applications for lots of clients, based on OpenGeo software. Or it could be a new product that leverages the OpenGeo Suite for a particular niche - cloud-based biological tracking, or a mobile geo-enabled emergency response system. Instead of trying to build a company that grows and expands to more niches those niches should be covered by other nodes in the network that can truly understand the market. But they’ll benefit from improvements to the geo core, and will also contribute back to it.
The selfish reason for these limits is that most everyone that we talked to about building and growing companies says the most fun stage is when it’s small. When you know everyone and have a common mission you’re working towards, where everyone is synced up [1]. We want to continue to work for those companies, and don’t want to have to leave and start new things. Some of these may be more profit oriented than OpenGeo, some may be less. So if we just split thing up along logical lines whenever it gets too big then we can continue on this path. We hope that we can continue the synergies of working together even if in separate organizations, and indeed open source software provides a model for this.
Footnotes
| [1] | One reason that smaller companies are a lot more fun likely is because of Dunbar’s Number, which propose’s a natural size that humans organize themselves. See also What is the Monkeysphere for a more humorous presentation of the ideas. These network and limits ideas could be seen as an attempt to take Dunbar’s number really seriously, imagining a world where we leverage the internet to make it possible for us to know all the people we work with. |
