I have been dazzled by what Stephen Wolfram has been doing with Wolfram Alpha since Day 1. The mathematical capabilities are exceedingly impressive, the backing knowledge base is exceedingly impressive, and the visualization has also come to be exceedingly impressive. The problem: no open source or anything.
I’ve never met Wolfram and acknowledge he has seen success many times greater than most. But, putting on my VC cap, I see an old school adherence to closed and proprietary.
I would not presume to suggest where the Wolfram folks should draw these lines on open and closed, but I definitely do counsel they work hard to open up as much as they can; it is in their own self interest. The business model of today is premised on leveraging the network effect in various ways. Total proprietary is a turn off and drives the compounding basis for the network effect into the dirt.
Maybe their recent pricing initiatives with Mathematica online are a wink toward this direction. But, better still find a core of functionality and knowledge base and release it as open source. The world will beat a path to what created all of this impressive stuff in the first place.
