A snapshot from a classic relentless-competition context; see this page for Larry Ellison’s Salesforce-bashing Oracle OpenWorld closing keynote (the Oracle Social Network part starts around time index 32:00) and this page for Marc Benioff’s Oracle-bashing renegade quasi-keynote
More importantly, the same kind of competition is going on throughout the tech industry. Facebook has published specifications of almost everything in its data centers, from printed circuit boards to building cooling systems. The idea is that others can use parts of this technology themselves, or possibly contribute to its improvement. The Open Data Center Alliance is a collection of more than 300 companies which together represent over $100 billion in annual information technology spending, is also pushing for shared information.
Google, which does use open standards, also keeps many things proprietary. Engineers in the company privately acknowledge that Google has developed specialized semiconductors for some of its in-house operations. It doesn’t patent the products, because that would show how they work in the first place. The number of companies that can work at Google’s scale is so small and powerful that it felt that would give its opponents an edge.
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