That question came to mind when I read Inside Facebook’s Fantastic Plan To Dominate Cisco’s $23 Billion Market, by Julie Bort, in Business Insider. The gist:
To recap: OCP launched two years ago to create “open source” data center hardware. That means hardware vendors like HP, Dell and Cisco don’t control the product designs. Instead, customers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs do.
OCP is the Open Compute Project.* What matters about the project, for our purposes, is that it models a way for a customer to relate to a vendor: taking the lead in the dance, rather than just following.
A question for VRooMers is, Can we as individual customers do the same thing? I’m thinking we can. One way is through personal clouds, including scenarios such as the one Phil Windley describes here. I am sure there are many others. So I’ll leave detailing those up to the rest of you. 🙂
*BI, like too many other ad-funded Web publishers, doesn’t link to OCP, but instead to its own page full of stories about OCP. This is unhelpful, selfish and at variance with nature of the Web itself. More about that here. (BTW, I’m guessing that the choice not to link is BI’s policy and not Julie’s, and would welcome correction on that.)