Filip Novotny We bring you another of John Gruber's glosses. On your blog Daring Fireball this time deals with the issue of openness and closedness of technology companies led by Apple:
Editor Tim Wu in his article for the magazine The New Yorker wrote a grand theory about how "openness triumphs over closedness". Wu came to this conclusion: yes, Apple is coming back down to earth without Steve Jobs, and any moment, normalcy will return in the form of openness. Let's look at his arguments.
There's an old tech saying that "openness trumps closure." In other words, open technology systems, or those that enable interoperability, always win over their closed competition. This is a rule that some engineers really believe in. But it's also a lesson taught us by the victory of Windows over the Apple Macintosh in the 1990s, the triumph of Google in the last decade, and more broadly, the success of the Internet over its more closed rivals (remember AOL?). But does all this still apply today?
Let's start by establishing an alternative rule of thumb for commercial success in any industry: the better and faster usually beat the worse and slower. In other words, successful products and services tend to be qualitatively better and are on the market earlier. (Let's look at Microsoft and its forays into the smartphone market: the old Windows Mobile (née Windows CE) hit the market years before both the iPhone and Android, but it was terrible. Windows Phone is a technologically solid, well-designed system by all accounts, but at the time of its the market was already torn apart by iPhone and Android long ago - it was too late for it to launch.You don't have to be the best or the very first, but the winners usually do well in both of those ways.
This theory is not at all sophisticated or deep (or original); it's simply common sense. What I'm trying to say is that the "openness vs. closedness" conflict has nothing to do with commercial success per se. Openness does not guarantee any miracles.
Let's take a look at Wu's examples: "Windows winning over Apple Macintosh in the 90s" - the Wintel duopoly was undoubtedly the Mac in the 95s, but mainly because the Mac was at rock bottom in terms of quality. PCs were beige boxes, Macintoshes slightly better looking beige boxes. Windows 3 has come a long way since Windows 95; the classic Mac OS has hardly changed in ten years. Meanwhile, Apple wasted all its resources on dream next-generation systems that never saw the light of day—Taligent, Pink, Copland. Windows XNUMX was even inspired not by the Mac, but by the best-looking operating system of its time, the NeXTStep system.
The problems of Apple and Mac in the 90s were not at all influenced by the fact that Apple was more closed, and on the contrary, they were fundamentally influenced by the quality of the products of the time. And this "defeat" was, moreover, only temporary. Apple is, if we only count Macs without iOS, the most profitable PC manufacturer in the world, and it remains in the top five in terms of units sold. For the past six years, Mac sales have outpaced PC sales in every quarter without exception. This return of the Mac is not in the least due to greater openness, it is due to an increase in quality: a modern operating system, well-designed software and hardware that the entire industry slavish copies.
The Mac was closed in the 80s and still thrived, much like Apple is today: with a decent, if minority, market share and very good margins. Everything started to take a turn for the worse – in terms of rapidly declining market share and unprofitability – in the mid-90s. The Mac then remained as closed as ever, but stagnated both technologically and aesthetically. Along came Windows 95, which also didn't touch the "open vs. closed" equation a bit, but which caught up to the Mac considerably in terms of design quality. Windows flourished, Mac declined, and this state was not due to openness or closedness, but to the quality of design and engineering. Windows has fundamentally improved, Mac has not.
Even more illustrative is the fact that soon after the advent of Windows 95, Apple radically opened up the Mac OS: it began to license its operating system to other PC manufacturers who produced Mac clones. This was the most open decision in the entire history of Apple Computer Inc.
And also the one that nearly bankrupted Apple.
Mac OS market share continued to stagnate, but sales of Apple hardware, especially lucrative high-end models, began to plummet.
When Jobs and his NeXT team returned to lead Apple, they immediately dismantled the licensing program and returned Apple to a policy of offering complete solutions. They worked mainly on one thing: to create better - but absolutely closed - hardware and software. They succeeded.
"The triumph of Google in the past decade" - by this Wu is surely referring to the Google search engine. What exactly is more open about this search engine compared to the competition? After all, it is closed in every way: the source code, the sequencing algorithms, even the layout and location of the data centers are kept completely secret. Google dominated the search engine market for one reason: it offered a significantly better product. In its time, it was faster, much more accurate and smarter, visually cleaner.
"The Internet's success over its more closed rivals (remember AOL?)" - in this case, Wu's text almost makes sense. The Internet is truly a triumph of openness, perhaps the greatest ever. However, AOL did not compete with the Internet. AOL is a service. The Internet is a worldwide communication system. However, you still need a service to connect to the Internet. AOL lost not to the Internet, but to cable and DSL service providers. AOL was poorly written, horribly designed software that connected you to the Internet using horribly slow dial-up modems.
This adage has been seriously challenged in the past few years, due to one company in particular. Ignoring the ideals of engineers and tech commentators, Apple persisted with its semi-closed strategy—or "integrated," as Apple likes to say—and rejected the aforementioned rule.
This "rule" has been seriously challenged by some of us because it's bullshit; not because the opposite is true (that is, that closedness wins over openness), but that the "open vs. closed" conflict has no weight in determining success. Apple is no exception to the rule; is a perfect demonstration that this rule is pointless.
But now, in the last six months, Apple is starting to stumble in big and small ways. I propose to revise the mentioned old rule: closedness can be better than openness, but you have to be really brilliant. Under normal circumstances, in an unpredictable market industry, and given normal levels of human error, openness still trumps closure. In other words, a company can be closed in direct proportion to its vision and design talent.
Wouldn't a simpler theory be better, that companies with visionary leaders and talented designers (or employees in general) tend to be successful? What Wu is trying to say here is that "closed" companies need vision and talent more than "closed" companies, which is nonsense. (Open standards are certainly more successful than closed standards, but that's not what Wu is talking about here. He's talking about companies and their success.)
I must first be careful with the meanings of the words "open" and "closed", which are terms widely used in the technology world, but defined in different ways. The truth is that no society is completely open or completely closed; they exist on a certain spectrum that we can compare to how Alfred Kinsley described human sexuality. In this case, I mean a combination of three things.
First, "open" and "closed" can determine how permissive a business is in terms of who can and cannot use its products to connect with its customers. We say that an operating system like Linux is "open" because anyone can build a device that will run Linux. Apple, on the other hand, is very selective: it would never license iOS to a Samsung phone, it would never sell a Kindle in the Apple Store.
No, apparently they wouldn't really sell Kindle hardware in the Apple Store any more than they would sell Samsung phones or Dell computers. Not even Dell or Samsung sell Apple products. But Apple has a Kindle app in its App Store.
Second, openness can refer to how impartial a technology firm behaves toward other firms compared to how it behaves toward itself. Firefox treats most web browsers more or less the same. Apple, on the other hand, always treats itself better. (Try removing iTunes from your iPhone.)
So that's Wu's second interpretation of the word "open" - comparing a web browser and an operating system. However, Apple has its own browser, Safari, which, like Firefox, treats all pages the same. And Mozilla now has its own operating system, in which there will definitely be at least some applications that you will not be able to remove.
Finally, thirdly, it describes how open or transparent the company is about how its products work and how they are used. Open-source projects, or those based on open standards, make their source code freely available. While a company like Google is open in many ways, it is very closely guarding things like the source code of its search engine. A common metaphor in the tech world is that this last aspect is like the difference between a cathedral and a marketplace.
Wu even admits that Google's greatest jewels — its search engine and the data centers that power it — are just as closed off as Apple's software. He does not mention Apple's leading role in open-source projects such as this W or LLVM.
Even Apple has to be open enough not to upset its customers too much. You can't run Adobe Flash on the iPad, but you can connect almost any headset to it.
Flash? What is the year? You also can't run Flash on Amazon's Kindle tablets, Google's Nexus phones or tablets.
That "openness wins over closedness" is a new idea. For most of the twentieth century, integration was widely regarded as the best form of business organization. […]
The status quo began to change in the 1970s. In technology markets, from the 1980s to the middle of the last decade, open systems repeatedly defeated their closed competitors. Microsoft Windows beat its rivals by being more open: unlike Apple's operating system, which was technologically superior, Windows ran on any hardware, and you could run almost any software on it.
Then again, the Mac hasn't been beaten, and if you look at the decades-long history of the PC industry, everything suggests that openness has nothing to do with success, much less with the Mac. If anything, it proves the opposite. The rollercoaster of Mac success — up in the 80s, down in the 90s, up again now — is closely related to the quality of Apple's hardware and software, not its openness. The Mac did best when it was closed, least when it was open.
At the same time, Microsoft defeated the vertically integrated IBM. (Remember Warp OS?)
I remember, but Wu obviously didn't, because the system was called "OS/2 Warp".
If openness was the key to Windows' success, what about Linux and the desktop? Linux is truly open, by whatever definition we use it, much more open than Windows could ever be. And as if the desktop operating system was worth almost nothing, since it was never particularly good in quality.
On servers, where Linux is widely regarded as technologically superior – fast and reliable – it has, on the other hand, been a huge success. If openness were key, Linux would succeed everywhere. But he failed. It only succeeded where it was really good, and that was as a server system.
Google's original model was audaciously open and quickly overtaken by Yahoo and its pay-for-premium placement model.
To attribute the fact that Google destroyed competing first-generation search engines to its openness is absurd. Their search engine was better—not just a little better, but a lot better, perhaps ten times better—in every way: accuracy, speed, simplicity, even visual design.
On the other hand, no user who, after years with Yahoo, Altavista, etc., tried Google and said to himself: "Wow, this is so much more open!"
Most of the winning companies of the 1980s and 2000s, such as Microsoft, Dell, Palm, Google and Netscape, were open source. And the Internet itself, a government-funded project, was both incredibly open and incredibly successful. A new movement was born and with it the rule that "openness wins over closedness".
Microsoft: not really open, they just license their operating systems - not for free, but for money - to any company that will pay.
Dell: how open? Dell's greatest success was not due to openness, but to the fact that the company figured out a way to make PCs cheaper and faster than its competitors. With the advent of manufacturing outsourcing to China, Dell's advantage gradually disappeared along with its relevance. This is not exactly a shining example of sustained success.
Palm: in what way more open than Apple? Moreover, it no longer exists.
Netscape: they built browsers and servers for a truly open web, but their software was closed. And what cost them their leadership in the browser field was a two-fold attack by Microsoft: 1) Microsoft came up with a better browser, 2) in a completely closed (and also illegal) style, they used their control over the closed Windows system and started shipping Internet Explorer with them instead of Netscape Navigator.
The triumph of open systems revealed a fundamental flaw in closed designs.
Rather, Wu's examples revealed a fundamental flaw in his claim: it is not true.
Which brings us to the last decade and the great success of Apple. Apple has been successfully breaking our rule for about twenty years. But it was so because she had the best of all possible systems; namely a dictator with absolute power who was also a genius. Steve Jobs embodied the corporate version of Plato's ideal: a philosopher king more efficient than any democracy. Apple depended on one centralized mind that rarely made a mistake. In a world without mistakes, closure is better than openness. As a result, Apple was victorious over its competition for a short period of time.
Tim Wu's approach to the whole subject is regressive. Instead of evaluating the facts and drawing a conclusion about the relationship between the degree of openness and commercial success, he has already started with the belief in this axiom and tried to distort various facts to fit his dogma. Wu therefore argues that Apple's success over the past 15 years is not irrefutable proof that the axiom "openness wins over closedness" does not apply, but the result of Steve Jobs' unique abilities that overcame the power of openness. Only he could run the company like this.
Wu did not mention the word "iPod" at all in his essay, he spoke of "iTunes" only once - in the paragraph quoted above, blaming Apple for not being able to remove iTunes from your iPhone. It's a fitting omission in an article that advocates that "openness trumps closedness." These two products are an example of the fact that there are other important factors in the path to success - better wins over worse, integration is better than fragmentation, simplicity wins over complexity.
Wu concludes his essay with this advice:
Ultimately, the better your vision and design skills are, the more you can try to be closed. If you think your product designers can emulate Jobs' near-flawless performance over the last 12 years, go ahead. But if your company is only run by people, then you face a very unpredictable future. According to the economics of error, an open system is more secure. Maybe take this test: wake up, look in the mirror and ask yourself - Am I Steve Jobs?
The key word here is "surer". Don't try it at all. Don't do anything different. Don't rock the boat. Don't challenge the general opinion. Swim downstream.
That's what annoys people about Apple. Everyone uses Windows, so why can't Apple just make stylish Windows PCs? Smartphones required hardware keyboards and replaceable batteries; why did apple make theirs without both? Everyone knew you needed Flash Player for a full-fledged website, why did Apple send it to the hilt? After 16 years, the "Think Different" advertising campaign has shown that it was more than just a marketing gimmick. It is a simple and serious motto that serves as a guide for the company.
To me, Wu's belief is not that companies win by being "open", but by offering options.
Who is Apple to decide what apps are in the App Store? That no phone will have hardware keys and replaceable batteries. That modern devices are better off without Flash Player and Java?
Where others offer options, Apple makes the decision. Some of us appreciate what others do—that these decisions were mostly right.
Translated and published with the kind permission of John Gruber.
I don't know if it's a bug on the iPhone, but sometimes the writing is missing in some words. On top of that, some sentences are not complete... Probably translated by Google and not proofread.
It can be understood as my (Gruberov's) opinion. As an analysis, difficult. I'm surprised that the serious press published it.
The comment is excellent.
So automatically because Gruber wrote it, it can't be true? Please show me what he wrote is not true.
These are unnecessarily complicated analyses. Apple was beaten by price then and it will happen again now. Competitors' products always catch up with quality and lower prices after some time. There are simply more of those less mobile. I've been using Apple products for 22 years, so I know what it's like :-)))
Apple beat that time by charging expensive garbage. Mac OS 8/9 could not be called anything else. Compared to that, the NTs were a miracle.
Now it may be partially repeated in the post-PC version. iPhone and iPad are not bad, but they are not the best either. iOS can't do very basic things (data sharing between applications really bothered me). And the price belongs to the higher ones. It certainly won't be as deep as Apple was in the nineties, but I don't think that in three years Apple will be perceived as positively (and be as hugely profitable) as it was a year ago.
So you're quite young compared to me, JURO, but still better than the iOS geeks who not only play "experts" in the field of Apple here...
On the other hand, closed-mindedness can also alienate customers. When I wanted to synchronize my calendar between Apple devices and one non-Apple device, I ended up with Google, because iCloud simply plays in its own sandbox and refuses to share data with non-Apple devices. In the end, I had to switch to a competing service due to the closure. It is similar with Fotostream. I replaced it with Camera upload on Dropbox as it works across devices and systems and uses a standard file structure that works well. Apple is like a golden cage. As long as you're inside, it's paradise. But woe betide you as soon as you try to take a single step out of the cage. Woe to you…
Very nicely written. Apple's closed-mindedness won out for me.
Excellent article, I read it a few days ago when Gruber posted it and thought it would be great to translate it, so thanks!
But to the comment. Some people here probably didn't understand what the article was about, so I'll write it very simply.
Gruber says that success is NOT defined by whether a business is closed or open. According to her, success is defined by the quality of the products. So Apple is not successful because it is closed. Even Google is not successful because it was (once) open. Both companies are successful because they make the best products in their industry.
So the closedness/openness nonsense is completely useless. In the end, it just depends on whether your product is 'the best thing in the world' or 'total rubbish'.
Note: for those who commented without reading the article, I would mainly read the passage where Gruber shows that Apple is more open than Google and that the company cannot be called open or closed. Because it is always about specific parts of the company.
But again, it doesn't matter if the company is closed or open. If it produces waste, it will not be bought in any case.
I'll keep buying junk people... because it's cheap.