Modularity and open-source technologies

In recent years, technologies has been moving towards modularity. No doubt the general consensus on technology is that it is making things smaller (nanotechnology), more effective and efficient. "Technologies" here refers to engineering, computing, bio-medical and all other aspects which the world are interested in. However let us only focus on "modularity" in Information Technology for this article.

Modularity is the degree to which a particular technology (software, hardware or even methodology) can be separated into various components or sections for easy construction or flexible arrangement. In other words, it allows for independent implementation and development of each layer. A complex problem/design is therefore made less complicated.

Most of the innovations today, as many would have realised, are not newly invented radical technologies. While most were taught to think out of the box, many, if not most of the most successful innovations were in fact incremental. In fact, radical technologies rarely rely only on newly developed techniques.

Software applications such as operating systems are moving towards modularity and open source development. While it used to be that people who used Windows would have a slew of related applications developed by the people at Microsoft (such as Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office Productivity Suite), this no longer holds true as the average user has started to explore other software such as Open Office and VLC player. This was especially true for companies but now the tech-scape is changing as companies are starting to develop customized solutions in-house or outsourcing such projects (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions to 3rd party vendors which include SAP and Oracle).

Microsoft has since no longer decided to try to keep out the competition as customers become more IT-savvy and look for open source software solutions. Thus they have decided to move C#, .NET CLI to community license. It does appear that business solutions providers are no longer trying to keep their technologies proprietary as the industry is moving towards cross-platform support and joint development. Internet is no doubt the greatest driving force for this phenomena which brings me to ask this question - Sony, are you listening?