Open Source And Industry Standard: Don't Underestimate The Early Adopter Who's Pandered
In thinking back over my recent-weeks’ post series regarding my largely successful efforts to free myself from platform-specific software and services:
- CES 2009: Open-Source And Otherwise Free Doesn’t Adversely Confine
- Information In The Cloud: Freeing My PIM (And Other) Data From Its Microsoft Shroud
- Cell Phones, Calendars And Contacts: Encouraging (Albeit Imperfect) Progress
- Freeing My Email: Open Source And Industry Standard As A Matter Of Course
- Open Source And Industry Standard: My Hardware Transitions Also Move Forward
I feel compelled to reiterate a point I most recently made (at least so explicitly) about nine months back:
I realize I do a lot of product reviews…I do these evaluations in part because I realize that on-hours engineers tend to also be avid off-hours technology early adopters and advocates to friends and family members. But fundamentally I attempt to treat them as big-picture case studies of engineering tradeoffs, the same sorts of tradeoffs that each of you in my engineering audience grapple with each day. Therefore, my hope is that even if the products you design aren’t similar to the ones I review, there’ll be something for you to learn.
Again and again these past few months, I’ve been happily surprised at how naturally (i.e. un-forced) my aspiration to go hardware- and operating system-agnostic has arisen, and how easy it’s also been for me to translate that aspiration into reality:
- I want to do a certain task, but to no longer be restricted to one specific hardware-plus-software combination for accomplishing it
- I do a bit of Google research to discover platform-agnostic alternatives
- I do a bit more Google research to discover how to migrate existing datasets into those alternatives (benefiting, in the process, from those who’ve already blazed these particularly trails, stumbling across and navigating through treacherous terrain in the process), and
- I follow in pioneers’ footsteps
Rarely, if ever, do I tackle projects just for the perverse fun of ’stumbling across and navigating through treacherous terrain’. Frankly, I don’t have sufficient disposable time for such extravagance. I tackle them because my current means of accomplishing something is problem-filled and/or because it has become too capability-limited for my current needs. While I might be on the leading edge of a trend (take high-definition video streaming through a LAN, for example), the consumer masses will likely sooner-or-later be there too.
Computing, communications and entertainment systems, whose pervasive online status is increasingly a given (and when it’s not, there’s always Gears and its peers), are exploding in numbers and in diversity of form factors, hardware implementations and operating system underpinnings. Over time, the mass of consumers will increasingly be intolerant of their data (including multimedia) being restricted to only a subset of their (and their friends’ and family members’, along with public access) widgets, especially when they learn of early adopter success stories (case study: Mozilla Firefox). Business considerations need to be kept in mind, of course; DRM for subscription content, for example, is a necessary evil. But locks put in place only to inappropriately boost profits are nothing more than an irresistible temptation for lock-pickers.
Developers of proprietary platforms reading this particular post, here’s looking at you. Particularly in these tight fiscal times, your days are numbered. Proactively evolve your business model, or industry evolution will lead to your extinction.
