Showing posts with label continuous improvement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label continuous improvement. Show all posts

08 February 2007

Of Continuous Improvement and Open Source

Hal Varian is one of the wisest - and oldest - commentators on Internet economics. he has a nice piece in the New York Times that looks at "continuous improvement":

What’s the difference between Vista and Google? There is no feasible way for Microsoft to experiment with Vista in real time; but it is very easy for Google to conduct controlled experiments and do so more or less continuously.

The same is obviously true for open source software: people can try out all kinds of variants before settling on the main code branch. And things don't need to be co-ordinated: hackers can just release the code and let it compete against other versions.