Static on the Dream Phone
Link: Static on the Dream Phone
"Verizon announced last month that it will open its network to ‘any application and any device’ by the end of next year.
But while Verizon’s pledge sounds promising, the language in which it is couched makes me wonder whether Verizon understands what a true open platform looks like. The announcement states that ‘the company will publish the technical standards the development community will need to design products to interface with the Verizon Wireless network,’ and that ‘devices will be tested and approved in a $20 million state-of-the-art testing lab.’ It’s not yet clear what standards developers will need to follow to write applications that work with both the device and the network, and who will control those standards.
This is not ‘open.’ It’s just a little less closed. A true open platform like the Internet doesn’t have certification of trusted devices or applications. Developers get to do anything they want, with the marketplace as their only judge and jury."
Tim O’Reilly in an op-ed in today’s New York Times makes the argument that if a developer has to ask permission to write an application on a given platform, that platform isn’t really open. This notion is one of the ten principles for platforms that I laid out in 2006 when I started Platform Associates.
As companies attempt to reap the benefits of open platforms, I’m seeing more and more situations where companies release fake open platforms — attempting to benefit from the momentum of platforms without performing the necessary activities to become an actual open platform. In Verizon’s case, one wonders what they think that "any device and any software" is supposed to mean.
Unfortunately for them, fake platform companies are also missing out on the benefits. When I’m engaging with a company that wants to provide a platform, I try to keep it positive and emphasize the benefits to openness, rather than focusing on the horrible credibility problems that happen when you say you’re open but really aren’t. For example, a lot of big companies hire teams of business development specialists to trawl for partnership opportunities. What if these opportunities simply came to you? Similarly, most companies (even very large ones) have difficulty performing all the engineering work necessary to keep every kind of customer happy. What if you gave customers the ability to do this work themselves? And so on, and so forth.
Platforms that use the term "open" without actually being open do so at their peril, but they’re also missing out on huge opportunities.
