Who's killing the software industry the fastest?

Which is killing the software industry (as we know it) faster -- open source or SOA?

Rikki Kirzner, partner with Hurwitz Group, points to open source as the great disrupter, noting that "the commoditizing force of open source software threatens the revenue streams of many ISVs."

Open source is resulting in a "a series of cataclysmic changes that are disrupting [software industry] economics and rendering it unrecognizable to those of us who have grown up under its influence," Kirzner observes. Open-source groups such as Eclipse have been "slowly building the software layers needed to create a complete open, robust, enterprise software stack."

Kirzner identifies the first of the one-two punch hitting the industry. The other punch, of course, is SOA.

Christopher Koch, executive editor of CIO, points to SOA as the great industry disrupter. SOA, as the current "dominant architectural trend, ...says the enterprise application infrastructure is almost irrelevant," he writes. "Technology is constructed according to services specified by the business, not by processes contained within an enterprise application vendor’s software box. In this scenario, enterprise applications become just a piece of the service, yet another component of a larger business process."

Koch points out that this can't be good news for vendors that rely on selling new upgrades every year: "Why replace all your old mainframe systems with enterprise software suites if you can cheaply and quickly link all the old stuff together into services using Web services and integration middleware?"

Along with Koch's observations, let me add that many products are being built around standardized interfaces or components, resulting in a commodization effect as well.  And, there's the growing convergence taking place between open source and SOA, with companies or organization such as JBoss, Apache, and Eclipse offering open-source platforms to build out SOAs.

In previous posts, I've also alluded to the "micro ISV" phenomenon, in which revenues are derived from transactions through components made available online and snapped into SOAs on demand. 

It isn't that commercial software vendors are going away, instead, they are being chased upstream, into the services and support space. But that's okay, because we all know our vendors always deliver fantastic service and support, right?

But in the meantime, if you were a software vendor, would you be worrying more about open source or SOA?