OSS that are profitable, difficult, or important?

“Apple became the first company to be worth a trillion dollars. They did that by spending five years single-mindedly focusing on doing profitable work. They’ve consistently pushed themselves toward high margin luxury goods and avoided just about everything else. Belying their first two decades, when they focused on breakthrough work that was difficult and perhaps important, nothing they’ve done recently has been either…
Profitable, difficult, or important — each is an option. A choice we get to make every day. ‘None of the above’ is also available, but I’m confident we can seek to do better than that. ”
Seth Godin in this post.

I encourage you to view the entire post at the link above. It gives definitions (and examples) of organisations that focus on profitable, difficult or important activities.

In OSS, the organisations that focus on the profitable are the ones investing heavily on glossy sales / marketing and only making incremental improvements to products that have been around for years.

Then there are others that are doing the difficult and innovative and complex work (ie the sexy work for all of us tech-heads). This recent article about ONAP talks about the fantastic tech-driven ambitions of that program, but then distills it down to the business objectives.

That leaves us with the important – the business needs / objectives – and this is where the customers come in. Speak with any OSS customer (or customer’s customer for that matter) and you’ll tend to find frustrations with their OSS. Frustration with complexity, time to deliver / modify, cost to deliver / modify, risks, functionality constraints, etc.

This is a simplification of course, but do you notice that as an industry, our keen focus on the profitable and difficult might just be holding us back from doing the important?