On Ecosystems

There has been a lot of dis­cus­sion lately over the rel­a­tive merit of open vs. closed (or inte­grated) approaches to user expe­ri­ence in con­sumer elec­tron­ics, mobile devices, and com­put­ing in gen­eral. But lost in the debate is the ques­tion of what per­spec­tive peo­ple are tak­ing: there are really two con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen­ing here but they are treated as one. And the posi­tion peo­ple take is largely dic­tated by whether they are argu­ing on behalf of the end users or on behalf of the developers.

User cen­tric

One of the big news items in the tech­nol­ogy world was the 5 minute tirade Steve Jobs recently unleashed against Google and its Android mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem. The rel­e­vant part that is key to the whole dis­cus­sion, in my view is the following;

We think the open vs. closed is just a smoke­screen to try and hide the real issue, which is: What’s best for the cus­tomer? Frag­mented vs. inte­grated. We think Android is very very frag­mented and becom­ing more frag­mented by the day.

To Jobs, the cus­tomer is key. So, in his view, and in the view of most peo­ple who sup­port the approach Apple is tak­ing, com­plete inte­gra­tion is the key to success.

This is a view that excuses any deci­sion by the prod­uct mak­ers as long as it keeps the cus­tomer happy. A few months ago, I alluded to Apple pro­vid­ing a Disney-fied ver­sion of the com­put­ing world:

… Steve Jobs, largest Dis­ney share holder. The net result is that the Apple leader has now learned to turn his com­pany into the new Dis­ney, bring­ing safe prod­ucts to the masses in a highly ster­il­ized envi­ron­ment that may not appeal to all.

And a Dis­ney­world ver­sion of com­put­ing is OK for most peo­ple. Most peo­ple love the magic king­dom but, for a por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion, Dis­ney world is a place you visit, not one you live in.

To Apple and its sup­port­ers, the end user of a prod­uct is the cen­tral point and the prod­uct cre­ator (in this case, Apple and Steve Jobs) has all rights over the direc­tion of the prod­uct as long as it ben­e­fits the cus­tomer. This leads to a mil­lion lit­tle deci­sion that add or remove com­po­nents and fea­tures of a prod­uct to cre­ate an all-encompassing offering.

Some of the deci­sions lead to truly amaz­ing leaps for­ward while oth­ers get more con­tro­ver­sial. And there is a high level of intel­li­gence to most of the deci­sions that go into mak­ing Apple prod­ucts but while Apple devices are intel­li­gently designed, nature isn’t.

And that’s where dif­fer­ences start being highlighted.

Devel­oper centric

The devel­oper world takes a view that is almost bio­log­i­cal when it comes to how soft­ware should evolve. From the very men­tion of ecosys­tems, to the way soft­ware ought to evolve, peo­ple who believe in the long term health of the indus­try as a whole argue that diver­sity always wins over integration.

In the developer-centric view, open­ness is an essen­tial com­po­nent because when every­thing can be seen, when trans­parency rules the land, then mis­takes get cor­rected more quickly and the best code wins. The devel­op­ers point to how evo­lu­tion works in nature and to the works of Dar­win on nat­ural selec­tion to high­light how the best code nat­u­rally gets selected from the wide diver­sity of offerings.

Open access to research seems to show that ideas that are not locked down end up being more suc­cess­ful. Open gov­ern­ment data allows for more work to be done vol­un­tar­ily and in a less expen­sive fash­ion that closed data. Open source points to sys­tems becom­ing more secure and more sta­ble. Open, in other words, seems to be the cure to all ailments.

In my view, open is great when a new sys­tem is intro­duced because it allows for any­one to look at any inno­va­tion, dis­sect it, and under­stand it. In other words, it lev­els the play­ing field by allow­ing any new­comer access to the same infor­ma­tion as any­one else. There is a demo­c­ra­tic ele­ment that is appeal­ing when hear­ing about open.

An impor­tant pro­po­nent of the open view is Tim Berners-Lee, the inven­tor of the web (and thus, prob­a­bly one of the most impor­tant fig­ure alive in the com­puter world today). When he first came up with the web browser, he made a key deci­sion that would accel­er­ate the growth of the web: he cre­ated a menu item that allowed any­one to view the “source” code, or the actual innards of a web page, to be viewed by any user who desired to do so. It allowed for a gen­er­a­tion of web devel­op­ers to learn the tricks of any­one that built a page before them offered and fos­tered an explo­sion of cre­ativ­ity that has led us to the cur­rent web.

So which way?

But the open web also allowed for some pretty dread­ful look­ing pages. How­ever, with bil­lions of pages now avail­able, the argu­ment is that the bad ones sink to the bot­tom while the best ones raise to the top. This would seem to jus­tify the value of open over closed, the value of diver­sity of a more edited approach.

There is, how­ever, a way to resolve both views and it is through a quote that has often been attrib­uted to Charles Dar­win, the father of evolution:

It is not the strongest of the species, nor the smartest of the species, but the most adapt­able to change that survive.

Whether the quote itself is from Dar­win or not, it rep­re­sents a posi­tion that could start bridg­ing the gap between the inte­grated and open world.

The answer thus must be that as long an inte­grated approach keeps adapt­ing to the changes in the mar­ket­place, it is OK to keep it closed. And vice-versa, it is OK to keep an ecosys­tem open as long as it ensures the high­est amount of flex­i­bil­ity in terms of adapt­ing mar­ket changes as quickly as pos­si­ble across all its constituents.

That later piece is dif­fi­cult to achieve for open sys­tems and I can see some of the value in what Steve Jobs is say­ing in terms of frag­men­ta­tion: while the iOS expe­ri­ence is a closed sys­tem that pro­vides a sin­gle, cen­trally man­aged expe­ri­ence that users can either sup­port or reject, Android has become a very dif­fer­ent world, where defin­ing what Android is about is increas­ingly dif­fi­cult: Is the Android expe­ri­ence what’s avail­able on an HTC Android device? A Sam­sung one? Or it is what’s avail­able in the lat­est ver­sion of the OS?

Open, at the end of the day, favors the devel­op­ment world but inte­grated (and, as a result, often more closed) favors the end user. Where you stand ulti­mately defines how you would view either.