The commoditization of IT?

IT, so the story goes, is now a boring commodity. But is this true?

Let's first define what a commodity is. There are a range of definitions we could use, but I'm going to think of a commodity as something that is functionally undifferentiated and available from multiple sources. The key aspect here is that of interchangeability (aka fungibility).

As an example, most computer components fall into the commodity category. Memory DIMMS, disk drives, network interfaces - you can (in principle) use any vendor's disk drives or memory and your computer will still work. You can use a mouse, keyboard, or monitor from any vendor and things will work just fine. Vendors have to differentiate in other ways - performance, cost, reliability, service.

What about smartphones? I would say that the phone piece is a commodity. Whether for a mobile or a land line, you can switch your telephone for another make or model, and you can switch from one telephony provider to another.

But the smart part of smartphones isn't properly interchangeable. You can't simply swap an Apple handset for an Android and carry on as you were; you have to switch everything to a different domain. And the suppliers here are keen to enforce differentiation and prevent interchangeability. We live in a world of proprietary walled gardens.

In most non-trivial cases, databases aren't commodities. Big database companies rely on the fact that you couldn't migrate to another database vendor even if you wanted to.

Operating systems are clearly differentiated. You can't swap Solaris for Windows, or either for Linux or BSD. You can't even treat different distributions as commodities if you restrict yourself to the Linux domain.

Although the operating system landscape is changing a little, in that Docker and containerization offer the prospect of interchangeability - you could, in theory, run a Docker image anywhere and on anything.

Cloud computing definitely isn't a commodity. (Thinking of it as a utility might be slightly more accurate.) Heck, there are sufficient differences over what's available that migrating between different AWS regions isn't smooth, let alone migrating between cloud providers.

Vendor lock-in is the big thing, and it's diametrically opposed to being a commodity - what vendor wants to make it easy for its customers to leave? (Despite that being one of the key attractions of any vendor in practice.)

One of the requirements for interchangeability is standardization, and there's a tension here between standardizing things (thereby making things the same) and innovation, which necessarily implies change. I could (and probably will at some point) go on at length about innovation, but I see precious little innovation in practice, more constant reinvention of the square wheel. Meanwhile the standards we have are either efforts like POSIX, which is largely codifying accidental implementations from the 1970s, or ad-hoc emergence of initial implementations that were cobbled together with little or no thought for actual suitability.

Rather than commoditization being a standard base, with a rising tide lifting all boats, any commoditization chips away the good stuff to leave the lowest common denominator, while everyone deliberately introduces incompatibilities in the name of differentiation.

So it seems to me that, far from being commoditized, IT has been monopolized and mediocritized.

Tribblix - illumos for everyone?

When I was doing a bit of a branding exercise for Tribblix, part of which generated the rather amateurish logo I now have - something I needed to make some business cards and stickers to take to FOSDEM this year - one of the things I wondered about was a good tagline.

In the end, I ended up with "the retro illumos distribution". Of course, it was pointed out that illumos was retro enough on its own, so the idea of a retro variant was a bit unnecessary.

The other tagline I came up with was "illumos for everyone". I rejected it in the end because it was a bit preposterous - I'm not really building something for everyone.

Yet the underlying idea here was simple - that I would actively seek to build a distribution that was inclusive, not exclusive. That's why:

• I have a SPARC version as well as x86
• On x86, I support 32-bit as well as 64-bit systems
• Tribblix is suitable for both desktop and server use
• Tribblix is a flexible system, not an appliance or hypervisor
• I work on ensuring Tribblix will work successfully on systems with more minimal resources than other distributions
• A variety of installation methods are supported - media, network, iPXE
• I've worked on installation in the cloud, both KVM-based and AWS, in addition to bare metal or other hypervisors
• I've tried to make key features such as zones easier to configure and use

Generally, the idea is to reduce the barriers and limitations for installing and using Tribblix.

This summer, I came across a much better way of putting it. Rather than "illumos for everyone", a variation of the UK Labour Party's slogan expresses the idea much more elegantly. Tribblix would be "illumos for the many, not the few". It's a shame that the slogan is already taken, as it expresses the philosophical aim rather neatly.