Open Platform Discussion

The Loft and other Giant Shoulder Inc., products represent the culmination of over twenty years of experience in the advanced high-technology industry.  The last few years have been spent as an apprentice, user, core-developer and ultimately a solutions provider in the digital wild. wild west.   Twenty years is not long enough to see this whole trend.

Current computer users may not know, or may have forgotten, the dominating trends in the computer industry for nearly the last half century.  Most are aware of "Moore's Law" which is that logic in semiconductor chips doubles every 18-24 months.  This is a key factor in powering the industry.  However, a few other trends have been ruling the industry.  These are:

1. Breakneck evolution and revolutions.  Smaller and newer platforms, initially laughed at, often devour the established players.  Mainframes were crushed by mini-computers.  Minis were subsequently crushed by micro computers.  PCs have obliterated micro computers and have an installed base easily exceeding 500 million units.  PCs and laptops are currently selling in excess of 100 million units a year.  Although the PC has had an unusually long run, times are a'changing. A classic book describing part of this process from the inside was Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine."

2. Most vendors use "lock-in" to deal with all these rapidly changing parameters.  Businesses do not have the resources to fight battles on all fronts.  So the simple solution is to "lock-in" the customer by having some widget that the customer needs and can only get from the company. After all, this is a "reasonable" thing for corporations to do allowing a return on their invested capital and labor.
   

3. IBM and others have spent billions to ready open-source for the enterprise market, think of the corporate 1000.  Huge portions of this technology are freely available to the technically competent.  The challenge is to make this technology accessible to the SOHO and end-users.   

4. Ultimate power nearly always resides with the many.  In the early days mainframe user groups and forums gathered together to share experience and to even swap code.  Modern day open-source has large numbers of users and developers.  These user bases and the developers are powerful catalysts for change.  Ultimately, the user, consumer or enterprise buyer can drive the industry.  World-wide networking fundamentally changes the way these groups  operate.  Cheap, nearly real-time communication enables new business models.  Academics go here.  Practitioners go here.

5. Innovations frequently happen in the garage not in the corporate office.  HP, Apple, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco pretty much are all originally garage companies.

Loft -- A different kind of "Trade Up" 

Open source development provides significantly more end-user freedom.  The Loft hardware platform is created to allow the user to upgrade the software and firmware to exercise the limits of the hardware.  The hardware is build with expandability in mind. This is a different kind of trade-up than the one suggested in the above sticker from a Linksys RV 042 or RV 082 product.