IT Making Money

IT companies like all companies have one target which is making money but in IT field there are many ways to make money, some of these ways are traditional like selling licensed software and hardware and some are not like advertising and producing open source software, the common thing between them is that they all make huge money.

Microsoft, Apple, hp and Dell all follow the traditional way and it has kept them the highest profit making companies – though hp has highest revenues, Microsoft has highest profits. These companies are rather old, they produce laptops, operating systems, video games, smart phones and everything you can imagine. Yes they make big money but still not so popular especially with people that care about Open Source and freedom of choice, you may not feel it but these companies collaborate with each other to keep the market and IT media masses under their control, they issue implicit and explicit agreements to support each other's software and hardware. Example of this is hp and Dell selling laptops with a pre-installed version of Vista. These marketing behaviors made them face many lawsuits, Apple was sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for trying to stop and remove online forums discussing iPhone. Microsoft also was fined $794 million for including Windows Media Player with Windows XP installation, imposing it on the user instead of letting him choose the media player he wants to use.

Leaving the giants and heading to the new stormers like Yahoo!, Google, MySpace and Facebook. All are less than 15 years old and all represent the ideal advertising model of making money. Google alone made about $10,491 billion in 2006 only by ads on their pages, this money represents 99% of total revenues of the company, this proves that ads can make big money.

The main idea in the advertising scheme is providing users with free or cheap - charge services and keeping them attached to them all day, then fill the site with tons of ads, this approach always needs more pages to support more ads and make more money, these pages can be applications, news or search results with ads relevant to your keywords. It also needs the company to spread its name in any way by producing anything: toolbars, gadgets and mail services. Attaching users to pages is taking a new approach that depends on making the page more personal as your own: like iGoogle, My Yahoo! and of course profiles on social networks. Any way, this is highly criticized for damaging the users' social interaction in real life, making them addicted to the Internet and wasting their time.

When we discuss making money using Open Source this does not mean that all Open Source applications are produced to make money, some of them are produced by normal people who have the passion to help others by coding.

Anyway, companies still can make money from Open Source. It may seem impossible but when you think deeply, you find that it might be the easiest way of making money, you can simply sell that software, the GNU license under which most open source projects are released doesn't forbidden selling the project, but to make people pay for what they can get for free, you have to provide support and packaging where you sell collection of configured software that can be installed easily with their manuals on CDs. The software can also be used as an advertising tool, you can place ads on the project's page on the Internet or use it to promote another version that has extra features but is not free.