But why would the software market suddenly turn competitive and into a commodity market? The answers are standards, the Internet, and Open Source software itself.

The correct way to build an application using 1990s thinking is to grab a copy of Visual Basic or PowerBuilder, develop a Windows executable and install it on every user's PC. The larger the number of PCs to install the software on, the more you walk around. When you need to upgrade the software, you put on your sneakers again and take another walk.

Now fast-forward to today. The correct way to build an application using millennial thinking is to put the application on a Website and get users to point their browsers at it. When you need to upgrade the software, you modify it once on the server and your users hit the `Refresh' button on their browsers. Web technology, if you stop to think about it, is a predominantly server-side technology. True, there's the Java applet, but hardly anyone uses it. There's JavaScript, but ever since the browser wars, when you couldn't be sure which browser would break your code, developers have been wary of coding a lot of JavaScript. That leaves virtually all development on the server side. All that the user needs is a lowly browser.

At one stroke, the Web has commoditized the server, because all a server needs to do is talk some standard "protocols". If it knows HTTP (HyperText Transfer

Protocol), it can talk to a browser. If it spits out some HTML (HyperText Markup

Language), the browser can actually render it for the user to read. Whither brand? Neither the browser nor the user sees the brand of the server software.

The same goes for other Internet standards such as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). They have completely commoditized the servers that implement them. Suddenly, standards are king, and anyone can play.

The favorite vendor tactic--differentiation--doesn't work very well in this situation. Differentiation breaks standards. More is less. A product that fails to comply with a standard is automatically incapable of surviving in the Internet ecosystem. Any superfluous features it boasts simply wither away through disuse. It's a self-perpetuating discipline. Internet protocols and standards rule with an iron fist. So it looks as if commoditization is here to stay, however much vendors may hate it.

What's more, every such standard and protocol is faithfully implemented in at least one Open Source product. That keeps commercial implementers honest, too.