Tuesday March 15, 2005
Tuesday March 15, 2005 Buzz about Solaris in a Buzz Prediction Market
At the O'Reilly ETech conference in San Diego this week. One intriguing research project that Gary William Flake of Yahoo Research Labs pitched appeals to my on-the-record fascination with the The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (who incidentally will be speaking at ETech tomorrow.)
The joint Yahoo/O'Reilly research project is called the "Tech Buzz Game". From the Yahoo website:
"The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you "put your play money where your mouth is.""
Before Gary even had a chance to finish his 15 minute pitch, many of us in the audience already had logins and were already investing our imaginary $10,000.
Due in good part to my significant investment in Solaris, I have been ranked twice today as one of the leaders in this buzz prediction market (the first time I was ranked #13, currently #21.) How cool is that?
I also applaud how attentive to open source issues the Yahoo and O'Reilly folks are. They are hip to the market changing OpenSolaris effort - on their "Markets" page they have a "Sun vs. Red Hat" choice between Red Hat and Solaris with the description: "Sun intends to put the heat on Red Hat with the release of Open Solaris."
Of course, as Jonathan has said to IDG News and Jim Grisanzio has blogged, we in OpenSolaris do not have Linux centered in our sights. Our #1 competitor for Solaris is, quite simply, Windows. (I personally think Linux has changed the competitive landscape in the operating systems world in some hugely positive ways.)
And, more importantly, we are simply trying to making the pretty-darn-amazing Solaris technology available to more and more people, to provide choice for customers and to stimulate innovation through the benefits of competition. All good things, to me at least.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris
Technorati Tag: etech
(2005-03-15 16:32:30.0) Permalink
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