Manga and Software Development
The November 07 issue of Wired has a great article by Daniel Pink on Manga. (see http://www.danpink.com/archives/2007/10/manga_monday.php ) He lays out a thesis for how the new business model of allowing fans of Manga to illegally use the intellectual property of the publishers (namely, their characters) will help save Manga from its current decline in Japan.
1) taking care of customers-- understand and meet their needs
2) find new talent
3) cheap market research
I saw a parallel between these ideas and really good software development. Public beta (or alpha) testing helps with points 1 and 2, when the data is collected properly. Any well-run web community for software developers addresses all three areas- look at Amazon, Programmable Web, Sprint, etc. Open source and communities like the IETF or W3C clearly help find new talent. By definition, Open source helps meet customer needs.
The common thread is community- with support for rating, collaborating, tagging, good search tools, visualization tools (even a tag cloud). Web 2.0 is the enabler of such a dynamic community.
How do you get around the illegal use problem? New licensing rules. GNU. FSF. Creative Commons. Limited use licenses that allow developers to do cool new things with your product, but no economic harm.
What do the publishers have to do to allow this? Provide well-designed and open API's. Test servers for developers. Community sites. Providing community help. Many have been doing this for years. Many don't, so open source efforts or user-created communities plug the void. And companies should put money into open source, not just legal staffs trying to protect against it.
Let people mod your games. Let them mash things up. Let them use a web API without making them screen scrape. Let smart non-developers develop.
