And, quite possibly, we are about to head for another great hallmark of technology transitions, standards wars, where customers try to figure out which company is likely to survive, and which of those likely survivors wants to lock them into an expensive proprietary range of products.
Use a smartphone camera to capture barcodes instead of an expensive proprietary scanner, and wrap a suite of hardware and software around it.
Time and again, this year's Summit focused on OpenStack's telco customers and the fact that they are using the software to replace a lot of their expensive proprietary hardware with software (the buzz acronym here is NFV — network function virtualization).
But in practice few are likely to enter this legal maze, and go to the expense of scanning millions of books, without any certainty of making money.In spite of this, Google claims that rather than suppressing competition in the emerging market for electronic books, the agreement would increase it by offering a web-based alternative to expensive proprietary systems such as Amazon's Kindle.
The company describes Kong as a "drop-in replacement for expensive proprietary API management systems".
Which is a puzzle, because by most accounts, Sun got into the strategic pickle it was in precisely because it had too many employees, spent too much money and clung to a business model too reliant on expensive proprietary computers bought in small numbers by elite power users.
This same process is now unfolding in the Big Data space, with an open-source ecosystem centered around Hadoop displacing the expensive, proprietary solutions.
The company, in limited availability since last month, uses Amazon Web Service (AWS), and other cloud services, making it possible for a business of any size to create secure networks without investing in expensive, proprietary big box hardware.
Historically, the world's top supercomputers relied on expensive, proprietary components.
Focus on creating solutions that were only previously possible with expensive proprietary data or not possible at all.
Some games which the military uses are off-the-shelf products, while others are expensive, proprietary simulations.
