The market thus far… ☀
Apple may possess the market lead for now, but I predict in a few years, it will succumb to challengers championing a more open approach. […] eventually, somebody is going to create a shiny computer phone that does all that iPhone does, without the restricted sandbox paradigm.I hear this argument a lot, but the market just doesn’t support it. Very few people care about openness. The iPod dominated music players despite a lot of “open” competition, and iTunes dominated online music sales despite DRM and restrictions. Android is semi-open (at least moreso than the iPhone), and nobody knows or cares except geeks like us. There are plenty of technological markets in which there has never been a dominant open player or option, such as game consoles, non-“smart” mobile phones, and nearly every type of enterprise software, but the markets still thrive and very few people complain about the lack of openness. Personal computers are the only major exception to this, and there are so many other contributing factors that it’s difficult to apply their “open will always prevail” theory to everything else with much confidence. As a sidenote, Google is an awful example of openness. They’re highly closed, proprietary, secretive, and inaccessible. It’s truly sad if they’re our only hope for openness in mobile computing for the foreseeable future.
The overarching arc of the history of computing refutes this assessment. Excepting for specialized niches, open has nearly always trumped closed. Early on, no. For decades, the state of computing was entirely a proprietary affair, with IBM (and a few other mainframe makers) the dominant force, almost apocalyptic in ushering advancement toward a mythical age of the supercomputer. Then came the microcomputer revolution that smattered that ethos in less than a decade.
As the PC proliferated across work desktops and later propagated to home users, the openness of the Microsoft platform just about pulverized Apple into nonexistence. The iPod (and later, iPhone), adoption of open source, and a never heretofore shiny Unix on the desktop incantation resurrected Apple from the bit bucket of history.
True, Apple, powered by market dominance of iPods and iTunes, proved resurgent in the 21st century. But it’s going to be deja vu for the lords of Apple, 25 years later. What is today is not necessarily what will be 5-10 years hence.
Open triumphing over closed does not result from “the public” being enamored with openness. And although the assertion about “geeks” comprising an infinitesimal and irrelevant market segment is on the mark, it misses the larger truth that “the geeks” are a huge bellwether in future techonology adoption. Long before Linux and Apache dominated the sphere of web server offerings, geeks and hobbyists were embracing it. When the Age of the Mac was doddering, and users had abandoned the platform in droves, it was the geeks, by the allure of a shiny Unix desktop and preferable more open development environment, that began flocking to OS X, predating the average users who would follow a few years later.
Granted, past history is not a guarantee of future results. And mobile phone industry chieftains appear intent to stifle innovation, instead treating their operations as cash cows. Google, too, I acknowledge, is not a model of openness and may not succeed in any endeavor other than search, and end up on the bottom from an erstwhile challenger themselves even in that market realm. But, eventually, mass saturation will be achieved by the more open option. It’s the way it’s always worked thoughout the Age of Computing — it just takes a few years to shake out.
