So now open sourcing of "crown jewels" AI software makes sense.
Competitive advantage is protected by custom hardware (and huge proprietary datasets).
Everything else can be shared. In fact it is now advantageous to share as much as you can, the bottleneck is a number of people who know how to use new tech.
Indeed. I kind of realized this more recently when I saw some new chips promote that Tensorflow works on them. This is really what it was all about - getting chips everywhere to support Google's version of AI, which means that in the long term they can get those chips themselves in volume - chips that are optimized for their AI out of the box.
Joel Spoelsky : "commoditize your complements." Steve Ballmer : "developers! developers! developers!"
Developers are a complement to hardware, software, and data based businesses. Google probably spends more on employees than on hardware or data. They really want to commoditize developers that can work on their stuff.
Google's business is based on having more and better data than their competitors. In many cases they have been happy to commoditize hardware, making open their datacenter designs for instance. That helps to cheapen their costs for building datcenters.
In other cases they open source software, like tensorflow and go language. These choices are made to commoditize developers. Google wants there to be a big pool of people who know how to use the technologies that Google uses. More developers means less costs for Google to hire and train employees. Which is their biggest expense: win!
With the TPU, as long as no one else is doing that kind of hardware for machine learning, it is a proprietary advantage to keep it secret. But at some point the logic flips: when others start to do similar things Google would rather commoditize their version of the tech. Because the lesson of the last 40 years is any widely used hardware WILL become commoditized. The inertia is with software codebases and developer knowledge.
Cool how he foreshadows the end of Sun (takeover by Oracle in 2010) in that article from 2002:
"Sun's two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you're going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley."
What? He also predicted how and why it would fail. Sun was a big enough player then that it could have survived plenty of other ways. Apple of today looks nothing like the company in 2000, but Sun got caught out more or less exactly as described and never adapted.
Agree. To attract devs to using your spec, then eventually go to your platform. But since the spec are open, AMZN/MS can make their own too. So it is still a good thing.
Competitive advantage is protected by custom hardware (and huge proprietary datasets).
Everything else can be shared. In fact it is now advantageous to share as much as you can, the bottleneck is a number of people who know how to use new tech.