

Open and Shut - ninthfrank07
http://daringfireball.net/2013/03/open_and_shut

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rjknight
Customers buy into visions, not products. The iPhone is successful because
it's both a great vision and a great product. In its time, Windows was a great
vision, at least from the perspective of the people who signed off the budget
for buying Windows PCs. Gruber is right that open vs. closed has nothing much
to do with it.

However, I think that it gets harder to stay closed over time. As markets
mature, products have to do more - interface with more hardware, be deployed
in more scenarios and so on. The "ecosystem" becomes important - how many apps
do you have, how compatible are you with the relevant bits of hardware? Apple
have done fantastically well at both of these things, ensuring a large and
high-quality app store, and good integration options. You can switch almost
your entire digital life over to Apple products and this works.

But will it always work? Will Apple always be able to ensure that your Apple
devices integrate smoothly with your self-driving car, your 3D printer, your
home automation systems? As the size and scope of your "entire digital life"
gets bigger and bigger, it becomes increasingly difficult for Apple to control
the entire ecosystem. Not _impossible_ , but to do it they need to keep on
executing at a very high level. They need to be able to say to people that
across a very wide range of devices, the Apple device is always the best
choice, that you don't need openness and interoperability because why would
you ever choose something that's not Apple? And to do that, you do need
"genius".

They're already failing somewhat. I don't know many people who think that
iCloud is better than Google's equivalent, or Dropbox. iTunes is unloved by
most people who use it, surviving largely on lock-in effects and Apple's good
commercial skill in dealing with the music industry. If I stop caring about
iCloud and iTunes, it becomes much easier for me to stop caring about my
iPhone and use an Android (or WP or Firefox or Sailfish or whatever) device
instead, because Dropbox and Spotify are open and don't make it difficult for
me to do that.

TL;DR: Maintaining a closed ecosystem is difficult in direct proportion to the
number of different components in the ecosystem, and the number of components
is only going to go up.

~~~
amirmc
> _"Customers buy into visions, not products."_

While I agree with the rest of your comment (esp the tl;dr), I completely
disagree with the above. It's always about the product. Think of every recent
Apple ad you've ever seen and ask yourself if they're showcasing the product
or some nebulous 'vision'.

People who sign off on budgets don't get lauded because they bought into a
'vision'. It's because product X fits their requirement and likely solves a
problem.

Vision, from the perspective of someone about to part with cold hard cash,
isn't much of a factor.

~~~
rjknight
OK, I may have phrased that badly. By "product" I meant simply the physical
item itself and by "vision" I meant "what that thing can do for you". It's
possible to make a beautiful, well-designed and all-round awesome product
that's still useless because it doesn't actually fit any real use-case that
potential customers might have.

~~~
amirmc
That makes more sense to me now. I lump that all together in 'product' whereas
vision is more about where a company is going and what philosophy is driving
it (if you get my meaning).

It is possible to have customers who purchase based on vision/direction but
this pretty much the defining characteristic of 'innovators' [1], who are
willing to take risks on unfinished or poorly supported products.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle>

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davedx
TL;DR: Gruber says Apple not being as open isn't important; that everything is
fine with Apple; that Apple really do 'Think Different'.

~~~
jagira
Stopped reading after a few paragraphs. He himself contradicts his arguments.

~~~
pazimzadeh
Which part?

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Steko
_Attn. John Gruber, I'll save you 3000+ words:_

Shorter Tim Wu...

(1) Apple is the most successful and profitable company in the world today.

(2) Apple is one of the most closed companies in tech.

(3) Ergo closed is bad.

~~~
soemarko
if you actually read the article, he wrote open/closed had nothing to do with
companies' successes.

~~~
Steko
If by article you mean Gruber then yes. If you meant Tim Wu's article then you
didn't read the same one I did, he says unequivocally that barring magic pixie
dust, closed loses.

I'm not arguing that closed wins because Apple is successful. I'm saying Tim
Wu's underlying argument is a complete non sequitur and that is more
effectively exposed with 35 words than 3,500.

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rtpg
> > Apple, in contrast, always treats itself better. (Try removing iTunes from
> your iPhone.)

> That’s the entirety of Wu’s second meaning of “open” — a comparison between
> a web browser and an operating system.

I think he missed the point here. In Firefox everything gets treated more or
less equally, whereas on the iPhone certain apps get treated better than
others. For example, there's the whole "only allowed to use Safari renderer"
nonsense.

>Mozilla now has its own mobile OS, on which, I’ll bet, there are at least
some apps you cannot remove.

I imagine the only apps on Moz you won't be able to remove would be ones that
deal with system settings. To be seen, but there'd be no reason not to build
it that way.

~~~
Xuzz
Try putting a different browser renderer on Firefox OS. You're pretty much
locked in to JavaScript — unless you can somehow build WebKit with Emscripten,
you're already behind what iOS can do — even with Apple's rules.

~~~
rtpg
In Firefox OS, the browser is the OS. It'd be like saying you can't replace
Dalvik in Android.

It's not about replacing the browser, it's about being able to replace things
that you should be able to. There is no good technical reason to not let
people replace Safari on iOS.

~~~
pohl
Not so sure about your last sentence. Can a replacement browser be any good
without using JIT compilation somewhere? Is the sandbox going to allow it to
jump into dynamically generated data? Are there any valid technical reasons
for having sand-boxing in the first place?

(I'm guessing "probably not", "no", and "yes".)

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tristan_juricek
TL;DR Gruber says "open vs closed" isn't really useful for determining
commercial success.

I agree, however, Gruber's writing doesn't make it really obvious that he's
slamming someone for confusing making money vs, say adoption of a technology.
In fact, if you read both articles, neither author has a clear concept of
"open vs closed".

The fact that high-tech systems eventually have to somehow integrate with
other high-tech systems is always glossed over. This "ecosystem" like behavior
is what separates high tech from, say, steel (an example used by Wu). You
build steel for a bridge, your customer buys that steel, they probably don't
think, "well, in 10 years, if you go out of business, where am I going to get
some more steel?"

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loso
It's kind of funny because for the most part I think Gruber proved the point
of his article. BUT I think he also proved another point as well, that history
is repeating itself and the IPhone might be in trouble. Not in trouble as in
people will stop buying it or it will not be a top phone. But in trouble as in
it will never dominate the smartphone market again. It may lead at some point
but not dominate. This paragraph really pointed it out to me

"The Mac was closed in the ’80s and thrived, much like Apple does today: with
a decent but minority market share, and very healthy profit margins. It began
to suffer — both in terms of scarily low dwindling market share and
unprofitability — only in the mid-’90s. At this point, the Mac had become no
more closed, but had become technically and aesthetically stagnant. And then
came Windows 95, which altered the closed/open equation not one bit, but which
closed the design quality gap with the Mac significantly. Windows thrived, the
Mac withered, and it had nothing to do with openness and everything to do with
engineering and design quality. Windows had gotten a lot better, and the Mac
had not."

There are a couple of more lines in the article that highlight this point as
well but this paragraph really brings the point home. It also shows that Wall
Street is not completely crazy when it comes to dropping the stock price of
Apple. Wall Street cares (short term) more about growth than anything else.
And unless Apple opens up and dominates another sector like it did with the
IPhone and the IPad we will not see the same rate of growth as we did before.

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pchristensen
Open-Closed is classic Innovators Solution stuff. When products aren't
satisfactory for customers, vertically integrated companies can optimize
better. When products improve to exceed customer satisfaction, open ecosystems
let new companies combine components in new ways to serve new customer
expectations.

Even the newest, shiniest phones have poor battery life, limited wireless
availability, and difficult input, so vertically integrated companies will
dominate (Apple, Samsung). When batteries, chips, antennas, etc are so cheap
and great that tinkerers can make a serviceable phone on Kickstarter, phones
will cease to be huge profit centers and design and manufacturing will be
distributed and fragmented, like PCs are now. The Open will have won.

Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution will teach you more than a thousand
flame wars. Open-closed is a meaningless distinction unless you also know
product quality and customer needs.

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largesse
This is a rather silly analysis.

Open beats closed over a longer time scale. It's an overall industry trend,
not a scoreboard for individual companies.

~~~
swombat
That's pretty much Gruber's point - that open technologies/standards beat
closed ones in the long run, but that "open vs closed" is nonsensical when
applied to analyse company performance.

~~~
largesse
Oh. Okay. It needs a TL;DR because I did read it, but it didn't help.

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Toshio
> "better and earlier tend to beat worse and later."

windowsphone/surface fanboys, take note.

~~~
nirvana
also android fanboys who are instead falling all over themselves to claim that
later and worse but open somehow beats better and earlier.

It's an ideology, mindless anti-progress, anti-innovation ideology.

