nightcats's Journal: The Open Source Society: Beyond Team

I have a new piece up at the blog about how the open source community labor model is surpassing the team-based paradigm of corporate culture. Here's an excerpt:

Let's suppose that most corporate-based, proprietary business units are indeed active, vibrant teams in their structure and resource pools. What open source is revealing today is that the team-oriented approach to business is being bypassed by another model, the community approach.

This is more than a question of numbers; it is a matter of dynamics. A team is a group-we, a closed, insular society that necessarily excludes other groups beyond its scope and expertise. A team must work within sharply defined boundaries that are fairly rigid and impassable. Thus we see that, for all Microsoft's wealth and both the numbers and expertise of its personnel and resources, it cannot begin to match the quality, reliability, and the pure cool factor of a product like Firefox or Opera. As I write here, Internet Explorer is continuing to drag its feet to the standards-compliance finish line, as testing of beta versions of IE8 continues. The open source browsers have been there for years.