McGuire’s Law

Today I’m coming home from Sprint’s Application Developers’ Conference. Yesterday I participated in two great discussions with forty of the smartest people in the industry. Thanks everyone for participating.

The discussion was about openness - what it means - is it good - what could be better.

Early in the first session, Epiphany Vera of Nellymoser quoted from a blog post by Nellymoser founder John Putterbaugh to define four factors to openness:

1. Open device OS and middleware
2. Open development
3. Open distribution
4. Open device network association

Another participant said that his company had identified twenty different distinct elements that could be opened. Any industry announcement on openness had to be carefully evaluated to understand which of those elements were changing from closed to open as a result of the announcement.

A third participant made the observation that openness means different things to different players in the ecosystem.

And a fourth said that openness means nothing at all, really because of all of the above. It is a term without clear meaning, so it means nothing.

However, this group was passionate about why openness could, nay should, be good.

Openness should increase choice for end customers. It should make it much easier for many more people to innovate in mobility, and therefore for lots of new options to become available.

Openness should increase profits in the industry. It should drive dramatic revenue growth and it should allow better margins for all players.

However, there are real and meaningful concerns about openness.

Openness could translate into infinite variations that the industry has to deal with. If developers need to develop for yet more platforms and derivatives of platforms, profitability and scale will be ever harder to achieve. If carriers need to support an endless array of apps on platforms, then care will become incredibly complex and expensive. Openness without standards could easily lead to chaos.

Openness and infinite choice could also fail to accomplish value for customers. Today, the carrier deck helps end users by presenting a small set of carefully selected applications and content. The choice is limited, but the discoverability is high and the choices can be trusted. As choices become unlimited, customers won’t want to lose the discoverability and trustability.

We all yearn for the promises of openness. I hope that discussions like we are having this week will help us achieve those promises and not succumb to the dangers lurking in the corners!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 5:31 am and is filed under Events, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.