Goodbye "Open" Hello Services

Umair Haque wrote an interesting post arguing that Apple's service and hardware businesses cannot succeed together indefinitely. The post wasn't very well received, but Umair sticks to his guns. The core of his gripes centered around how the iPad furthers Apples customer lock-in strategy and how openness is the future for businesses creating hardware that traffics in media "things." Related to my post the other day, I argue that this idea of openness as related to media, is going to matter less and less as services continue to evolve and play nicely with one another.

So apologies for a bit of a repeat from yesterday, but I am amazed by how fantastic the Netflix and Kindle apps are on the iPad. Seamless service experiences. iPad was just the avatar. You can cut right past Apple’s media, DRM etc. I wouldn’t call that being locked down. Thats very powerful. And that was Apples choice. Granted a choice they had to make to keep their savvy customers happy. I think that those applications (services) represent enough openness for the average person, ya?

What I am hearing Umair say, is that locked down = doing it wrong.

But historically…

Open & Open Source = less than ideal user experience (crappy if you want toss some mudd).

Geeks want open (lumping myself in this bucket). But people want great customer experiences. The more open you get the harder it is to maintain an awesome UX. Look at Android, its considerably more open than what Apple is doing, but it is also sloppy as hell in comparison to Apple. I cant get music onto my Droid easily, legacy hardware issues abound etc. Look at Boxee and XBMC, my non-geek friends can’t get those apps up and running in their living rooms. Open isn’t there yet and it may never be. Good services will eat Open’s lunch. Why? As Umair points out good services are healthy businesses and capable of delivering fantastic customer experiences.

Its not about openess in the geek sense. Its about services playing nicely with one another and high quality overlapping customer experiences. If things keep swinging in the Netflix / Kindle app direction this argument over openness changes if not disappears. I think Apple is riding a razors edge of being locked down just enough. They let people like Kindle and Netflix play on the iPad, but they would never let another proprietary media format like WMV onto their devices filesystems. Essentially Apple is saying we will let third party services play on our lawn but not third party technologies. An interesting distinction, and one that I think allows them to run both services and hardware businesses indefinitely. At the end of the day customers are going to care more about Netflix / Amazon style service experiences than the underlying technology lockdown. With iPhone OS 4.0 announcement showcasing the ability to run Last.fm and Pandora in the background instead of your iPod I see Apple in a position to be the best avatar/touchpoint for awesome services. While Umair is trying to get his mp3s off his iPad I will be happily streaming away with the rest the kids. :-P (Edit: I was wrong Umair likes streaming too)

In all seriousness, Bruce Sterling touched on this shift during is SXSW closing comments and it resonated with me. The Upcoming generations are going to care less about the philosophies (dogma) of the current web generation who scaffolded this whole web thing together. My nieces and nephews don't care about DRM or openness. They grab my iPhone from me and head straight for games and media they can get for free. This new generation is going to be brought up on good service experiences. Not principles from Napster era local MP3 hoarding 30+ year olds. A dogmatic approach to openness isn't solving any problems (not saying Umair is dogmatic).

"When I was your age I had to go to the AOL and get a massmail in the Zelifcam chatroom to have any fun on the interet! And I walked uphill both ways to school."

Shout out to Higgs at Made By Many who brought this to my attention. He wrote a nice post on the topic. Check out the comments for an interesting response from Umair.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=501032598]

Man this would look so sweet on the TBG blog. Also, this new Broken Social Scene album is awesome. Also I saw Who Made Who at south by but where were you? So sad.

[Justin Baum]

1) Both these post have been on the TBG blog for a while ;)

2) The new Brok Sosh is frikken awesome.

3) The fact that I missed WhoMadeWho pains my soul.