What If Microsoft Had To Approve Every App On Windows?

from the playing-the-what-if-game dept

I've been pointing out why an open platform beats a closed platform over the long haul with regards to the iPhone, and linking to various stories concerning the arbitrary nature of being allowed (or not) on the iPhone. But, Harry McCracken, over at Technologizer, does a great job illustrating the point by playing the "what if" game, and thinking about how Windows would have developed had Microsoft similarly controlled every app. It doesn't take long to realize how much slower innovation would likely have been on the PC platform (though, it might have opened up more of an opportunity for other platforms):

Would Microsoft have distributed Microsoft Office rivals such as SmartSuite or WordPerfect Office via its app store?

Well, maybe, in theory at least-after all, it doesn't sell Microsoft Office as part of Windows, so it couldn't use the "it duplicates functionality that's already in the product" excuse. Call me a cynic, though, but I suspect that competitive office suites would have run into trouble if Microsoft had controlled all Windows software distribution. And hey, didn't WordPerfect duplicate features in Notepad?

How about Netscape Navigator?

When Netscape first appeared in 1994, the current version of Windows (3.11) didn't have a browser. Even Windows 95 didn't have one at first--Internet Explorer was part of the extra-cost Plus Pack. Then again, Windows 95 did ship with the dreadful client for the original version of MSN, a proprietary online service which definitely did compete with the Web. That might have been reason enough for Microsoft to nix Navigator for duplicating Windows functionality. And once IE was part of Windows, Microsoft could have given Navigator the boot retroactively.

Safari? Firefox? Chrome?

They all appeared long after Windows got a browser as standard equipment. No, no, and no.

And it goes on from there. Fun thought experiment if you're one of the believers that Apple's closed iPhone system is somehow "good" for innovation.

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From Closed To Open: iPhone App Developer Skepticism Highlights Platform Trajectory

from the closed-vs.-open dept

I've been getting into some interesting discussions with people lately concerning open vs. closed platforms -- especially in light of the supposed "success" of Apple's iPhone app store, which is a very closed platform. And the point that I've tried to make is that you have to understand the trajectories of these things over time. At any given time, it's never difficult to find a closed platform that is successful. In fact, I'd argue that if you are reshaping a market, often it helps to have a closed platform initially to drive that market in a useful direction -- though, this can really only be accomplished by someone visionary (Steve Jobs certainly counts). The question is how does this play out long term. And the answer is that you can't stay closed too long, or open solutions will catch up and surpass you. We've seen this pattern multiples times (closed AOL --> open internet?).

Where this gets trickier is that the open solutions are almost always substandard to the closed solutions initially. In some ways, this is by design. The closed solution is often much cleaner and slicker, and so it gets a lot of the initial use. But, overtime, the limitations of the closed solutions become increasingly clear, and as people bump up against those limits, frustrations increase, and more and more effort is put towards making the open solutions better -- even to the point that eventually they exceed the closed solution. It's a messy process, but the point where momentum shifts is often a subtle one, and the proprietors of the closed solution usually don't recognize it's a problem until way too late.

I believe that's the case with the App Store. The iPhone itself did an amazing job pushing the state of the mobile phone/portable computer market forward. There are some people who like to mock it as nothing special, but that's unfair. The device itself was a huge leap forward in demonstrating what a phone could be, and many others are just starting to grasp what this means more than two years after the original was introduced. That said, we're seeing more and more evidence concerning frustrations on the limits imposed by Apple's closed system, such as the arbitrary rejections of apps.

James points us to a worthwhile post from an iPhone developer, noting how the process is getting to the point where it's less and less worth it to develop for that platform. You have to put in a ton of work, and then you have to wait for quite a while just to get the app approved (or rejected), and the whole process is quite arbitrary. With that in mind, developers have a lot less certainty, and it shows a growing interest in other platforms.

To date, admittedly, such alternatives really haven't been very good. There are other app stores (some more open than others), but none has really been able to build up much traction yet on other devices. But there's a huge opportunity here if someone else can make this happen (or, if there were a way to standardize across some of the competitors) and start doing a better job serving both developers and consumers. The closed solution helps define the initial market -- but the open solution almost always wins in the long run.

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Why Facebook Can't Become Twitter: Its Closed Nature

from the what-happened-to-openness dept

There's been plenty of talk about how Facebook has been trying to morph more into being like Twitter, to avoid being "last year's model" when it comes to the "social networking hype focus." Last week, the company got some news for supposedly "opening up" newsfeeds for outside developers to build into their apps, with many people saying that this is how the site becomes more "Twitter-like." The NY Times had a big writeup over the weekend, talking about what a crazy idea it is that Facebook would just let anyone come in and "take" its content and put into other apps -- even though, there are tons of services that do exactly that and have found it to be quite useful. Except, it appears that Facebook isn't quite as open as the press coverage and press releases would lead you to believe -- and a big part of it is the foundation on which Facebook is built. One developer (full disclosure: the guy in question is a close friend/former housemate) recently created a rather useful app that turned the Facebook feed into an RSS file. A review of the app at Read Write Web discussed how incredibly useful the app is, listing out five things it makes possible that were impossible before -- partly in making the app more Twitter-like. This is great. Hurray for openness making things possible, right?

Well, not exactly. It seems that Facebook is hamstrung due to its own setup. Because the initial purpose of Facebook was for private updates between friends, making that data public is a huge no-no, and so it took just a couple days before the useful app was shut down, noting that it could violate user privacy. Since Facebook has been a punching bag over privacy issues for a while, this is no surprise. If you had a friend's status updates in your news feed, and he or she had set them to be viewable only by certain people, converting them into a public RSS feed does have potential privacy implications.

That makes sense from a privacy standpoint, but it shows why it will be quite difficult for Facebook to "become Twitter." Its entire setup is in many ways the anti-Twitter. Twitter was designed, on purpose, to be extremely public and open, and that's how people use it. Facebook, however, with its fine-grained privacy controls and focus on personal communication only between people who agree to communicate with each other is pretty limited in how much it can open up. The more it tries to become like Twitter, the more its own setup gets in the way. The app to make your Facebook news feed into an RSS feed is quite useful... but it can't work with Facebook's privacy settings the way things are set up today. Of course, some might point out that an individual could just as easily take their own Facebook news feed and republish it publicly using the time-tested method known as "cut-and-paste." Realistically speaking, creating an RSS feed is really not all that different than just cutting and pasting the info directly. The issue isn't so much privacy policies, as the user's individual decision over what to do with the info, though, Facebook would probably note that the automated push-button nature of the Newsfeed RSS app is the problem.

Either way, beyond just demonstrating the general differences between Twitter and Facebook, this also shows how legacy decisions, which make all the sense in the world at one point in a service's development, can significantly hinder certain changes later on.

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Don't Announce You're Open When You Just Blocked Someone Out

from the just-a-suggestion dept

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff bashed Microsoft and its new cloud computing initiative, suggesting that it was unfriendly to partners: "They hate everybody and we love everybody, and that's pretty much the difference. We even love Microsoft. ... This is our core strategy, love." While we tend to agree that Microsoft's strategy leaves much to be desired, that doesn't mean that Salesforce's strategy is really all that much better. In response to Benioff's claims that they "love everyone," the CEO of Zoho suggests a less lovey-dovey version of Salesforce.com, noting that Zoho was all set to launch products on Salesforce's own cloud computing platform, Force (formerly AppExchange), when suddenly Salesforce.com blocked Zoho -- mainly because Zoho offers a competing CRM system.

Just a reminder that it's easy to say you're open -- but if you're not really open, someone's going to call you on it.

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Thomson Reuters Sues George Mason University For Making Its Software Output More Useful

from the how-dare-they! dept

A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that financial information giant Thomson Reuters is suing George Mason University for the high crime of releasing some software that can convert the output of Thomson Reuters own EndNote software into a more open format. EndNote is software for creating bibliographies, from a variety of different databases. The George Mason software, Zotero, does the same thing -- but also will take documents saved in EndNote's proprietary format and save it in its own open format. In normal times, under normal laws, this shouldn't be a problem. Reverse engineering is considered a perfectly legitimate practice in most cases -- and, in fact, is considered an important part of the competitive market in driving innovation. But, thanks to the DMCA, when it comes to software, this type of behavior can be blocked within a license agreement. This is one of the worst parts of the DMCA, in that it's clearly not about protecting copyrighted material, but about preventing any sort of competition in the market place.

If Thomson Reuters execs actually thought about this, they would realize that Zotero actually makes EndNote more valuable by making the output more valuable. As long as Thomson Reuters is willing to keep adding more and better features, then it should have nothing to worry about from Zotero, who only enhances the value of EndNote's output. Instead, Thomson Reuters is using the old claim of felony interference with a business model to shut down a university-produced open competitor. Thomson Reuters' claims make this quite clear, in saying that Zotero is "destroying the EndNote customer base." Back here, in the real world, most people call that competition and think it's a good thing, rather than against the law.

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Why Zittrain's Techno-Pessimism Is Unwarranted

from the no-worries dept

Ars Technica reviews Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Zittrain is by all accounts a smart guy and an engaging speaker, and it sounds like his book makes a lot of worthwhile points about the importance of open, "generative" technologies. But I just can't get worked up about Zittrain's warnings that the dominance of open systems is a fragile, temporary thing. It seems to me that there's a basic tension at the heart of Zittrain's argument. On the one hand, he argues (correctly in my view) that open platforms are better for innovation because of their lower barriers to entry. On the other hand, he wants us to believe that despite that inherent advantage, open technologies are on the brink of being eclipsed by closed platforms like the iPhone.

I think this misses a couple of important points. In the first place, I think Zittrain draws the wrong lessons from history. Zittrain himself notes that until the 1990s, the world was full of proprietary networking technologies and computing platforms that had big advantages over open technologies like TCP/IP, Unix, and the mostly-open PC platform. Open technologies had a few advantages of their own -- most notably government support of TCP/IP -- but open platforms were definitely the underdogs in many respects. And then, of course, the open platforms utterly destroyed the closed ones. Almost everyone now uses TCP/IP, while AOL is now little more than a mediocre website. Virtually all desktops and laptops -- including Macs and a lot of Unix workstations -- now largely share a common architecture. And almost every operating system not made by Microsoft is built on some versian of Unix.

Zittrain would have us regard all of this as some kind of fluke or lucky break, that the whole thing could come crashing down at any minute. But I think it's evidence that better technologies tend to win out in the marketplace. TCP/IP beat out AOL and other proprietary services precisely because open architectures enable more innovation. And once an open architecture comes to dominate a given market, it becomes harder, not easier for a proprietary product to displace it, because network effects create tremendous intertia on behalf of established open standards. I'm hard pressed to come up with any examples of a well-established open standard getting displaced by a closed one. Rather, what tends to happen is that new, proprietary technologies tend to get built on top of open ones. The top layers of the iPhone software stack may be closed, but it's built on TCP/IP, HTTP, and a host of other open standards.

It doesn't, therefore, make sense to view the iPhone as a threat to "generativity." The iPhone itself may not be "generative," but it's built on the same open standards as more open devices. That means that growing the iPhone market is a net positive for openness overall. True, people who buy an actual iPhone aren't getting the full advantage of generativity, but they are helping to further entrench TCP/IP and the web, platforms on which other more generative technologies can thrive alongside the iPhone. Moreover, if Zittrain is right that open platforms promote more innovation, which I think he is, then we should expect the same thing to happen at the top of the stack as happened at lower layers of the stack: over time, open mobile platforms like Android should enjoy more innovation than closed platforms like the iPhone, and the former should gradually displace the latter. Consumers tend to choose more open platforms over time not because consumers care about "generativity," per se, but because they want the phone with the best software, and open platforms tend to get the best software over time. And smart companies will tend to open up their platforms over time, lest competitors leapfrog them with a more open product. Indeed, as Mike pointed out a few days ago, that's already happening with Nokia's decision to open source its Symbian operating system.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Ricochet Is Really, Really, Really Dead? No Joke?

from the seriously? dept

I'd almost think this was an April Fool's joke if it weren't for both Glenn Fleischman and Steve Stroh reporting on it, but it appears that Ricochet, one of the first wireless ISP services is finally dead, for real. This is the service that used up more than its allotted nine lives. I was an early Ricochet customer, and still have two old Ricochet modems. For a period of time when I was killing off broadband companies, Ricochet's 128kbps service via Metricom was my connection to the world -- until it went bankrupt and shut down the network. After that, Ricochet kept resurfacing, as the company was bought and then sold and bought and sold again. However, each new owner would try to do something new with it, only to realize that the wireless network had totally missed its chance. With the rise of WiFi and cellular 3G, Ricochet just didn't make sense any more. Still, it's a bit sad, as I still remember wowing people by being able to connect to the internet while on the go. These days it may be common, but a decade ago it was a big deal.

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