The quote below was written yesterday on O'Reilly Radar. I've taken out the product/company references at first because generically it sums up, nicely, the reality and power of true collaboration (not just teamwork with your deskbuddy or local team).
Increasingly it’s becoming clear that shouldering the research and development burden individually is an expensive approach. While monopoly position in the past has allowed them to fund this massive development, we believe that in the future, competition from collaborative forces will make such an isolated position untenable.
Now this is actually a quote referencing the rapid development of Linux and its future against Microsoft, taken from a report published yesterday that puts the value of the Linux kernel at US$1.4billion and highlights demonstrably massive growth in the last few years.
Talking to Serena about this this morning she mentioned that Clay Shirky talks about Linux in his latest book, Here come everybody and a quick search online finds this video of him talking at TED about the whole open source, peer-2-peer concept.
Refocus
There's a lot of discussion around "collaboration" and dozens of blog posts out there that ask, A) what the hell collaboration actually is, and B) whether it's become yet another meaningless catch all phrase that might just strike the necessary chord with the purse-holder and get you some budget.
As said, the resources above seem to capture what collaboration is at its very core (or kernel!).
