Open source = better sports
Contrary to (American) public opinion, soccer/football really is the most interesting sport in the world. And a group of American statisticians have proven it. As E. Ben-Naim (Los Alamos) and colleagues suggest in this report [PDF], a sport is most exciting if the end result (Team A will beat Team B) is often in question. Using this as a measure, they find that soccer is the most exciting sport due to the unpredictability of its results.
As reported in Nature:
A sport’s ‘upset probability’ is calculated from the number of timesthat the team with the worse record wins. The larger this quantity is, the more evenly matched the teams are - in other words, the more competitive the league is.
They find that, since records began - before 1890, in the case of English football - the chances of an upset have been consistently greater in English soccer than any of the American sports. The underdog wins 45% of the time in soccer, but just 36% of the time in American football.
I had no need for a scientific report to tell me that American football is boring. But I’m glad they’ve proven it, all the same.
Interestingly, however, the scientists find that soccer is, over the past 60 years, and especially in the last decade, losing some of its excitement. Why? Because results are becoming more predictable as money flows into the game. Chelsea, Manchester United, etc. - these teams regularly trounce their lesser-monied Premiership fellows because they can afford to acquire every player worth having. Not interesting to watch. In turn, this influx of money is turning the Premiership, in particular, into a league nearly as boring as the Italian Serie A league. The more money in a league, the higher the stakes, the bigger the incentive to play to not lose.
What’s the open source analog? Open source is profiting, in part, from the big software companies’ desire to not lose. They’ve sold about all they can sell, and have huge financial commitments to given customers and markets. As Clayton Christensen writes, their incentive is to keep feeding their existing customers with bloated, feature over-rich products. They consolidate (tantamount to the big soccer clubs purchasing all the talent) and then duke it out with other software hegemons. They have no incentive to play innovative soccer, as it were. Their incentive it to defend and eke out a 1-0 win or, worst case, a draw. There’s too much money at stake to experiment.
Customers, for their parts, don’t like this tedious IT any more than I like watching lazy soccer. Yes, enterprise buyers want predictability in their IT systems. But they also want innovation (product and business model), and they’re simply not getting it from the hegemons. They’re getting it from open source.
In short, open source = Arsenal. Enterprise bloatware = Juventus.