Nike has long been known as a company that doesn’t fear experimentation. It was one of the first to combine wearable tech with user data and has revolutionized the athletic wear industry. Now it is joining the ranks of other major industries in sharing open source company software with the tech community. This could lead to improvements in the products and other benefits of collaborative programming.
Retail technology is changing at a rapid rate, and as new market technologies emerge, companies are expanding the reach of their collaborations. Retail companies such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Target have been using GitHub to share open source software and enable collaborative development for product software. Nike is the most recent of these large companies to utilize Github to post their software and open it to improvements by the public.
One major development for the use of open source software projects by major companies is to help the customer-industry relationship improve. One of the most difficult challenges of being a huge company like Nike is that they lack the feeling of closeness to their customer base, and that affects their sales and public relations.
However, putting their code on Github can give these companies some of the feeling of collaboration and democracy usually reserved for smaller startups.
Github is the largest host of source code in the world
For those of you who are unfamiliar, here’s a quick rundown. GitHub is an online platform for source code management, with the added feature of a graphical-based online interface. It is a repository of the initial source code and all the subsequent changes made to the program. This means not only that changes are collaborative, but also that people who have no affiliation with the project can download the source code and adapt it.
It is useful to any company that integrates retail apps into its services. Nike has been struggling with slow growth, and this GitHub debut may serve as a way of attracting tech geniuses to employ working on the company’s numerous apps integrated into its products. If Nike’s app development improves, it could snag an even larger market share than the already huge share it holds.
What exactly did Nike release on Github?
Nike released three things on Github. The first is a logging library which was written in Swift (a programming language created by Apple for iOS). The second is a distributed tracing solution written for Java (gathers timing data). The last is a framework for parsing JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).
These will all allow established or new programmers to experiment with their code and make improvements, hopefully attracting tech talent to Nike’s development team. Bravely, they also released the code for their home website.
These releases demonstrate a broader trend in the retail world of encouraging collaboration with the tech world and combining forces to try to create the perfect product. Do you think the future of retail will really rely on mobile apps like some say? Or did Nike make a mistake using open source code and exposing its ideas to competitors?
