“Outsides” building your stuff?

Recently, Yahoo announced they were letting “outsiders” build their email solution. Why would they do that, some might ask? Why would they not, is what I’m thinking. Get the best ideas to come help you and not only will it be potentially incredible, but they will have a sense of “ownership” of your offer. Can that lead to badness?

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  1. Nilofer,
    I do agree with this model. It generates new ideas and creates new markets that ultimately benefits Yahoo. IBM did the same thing with their RUP (Rational Unified Process), Cloudscape (Java Data Server). Our biggest open source project, Eclipse, was a 40 million donation to the open source community in 2001. This not only makes the development cost of applications for IBM (as well as other companies) minimal since they are using an open source base with contributors outside the company, but also the free framework brings in more customers and increase the market share for IBM. There are many other advantages such as quality, time-to-market, better relation with consumers (who can also be contributors), brand loyalty, etc.
    Thanks for that thought.
    – Farnaz Erfan

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