Open or perish. It’s a meme that’s been embraced as fact ever since Eric Raymond published his seminal essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” If you are not “open,” i.e., open source or open APIs, you don’t get it, and you’re destined for obsolescence. But while there is an appealing logic to this premise, the reality just isn’t that black and white, especially when it comes to the mobile arena.
Consider the different approaches to openness taken by the two companies with arguably the greatest product differentiation, most thriving ecosystems and potent cash-flow generation engines in the business: Apple and Google. The former Apple is more proprietary, with an integrated approach to hardware, software and service. The latter Google is generally perceived to be more open, taking a “loosely coupled” approach to systems and services. Both are breakout businesses, with legions of devoted followers. So which approach is better?
Apple is widely lauded for delivering a superb user experience, offering great synergy and seamless integration across its different product offerings, but it’s also an occasional bully, self-selecting which services and offerings it anoints as value-adds, and which it blocks as deleterious Flash or redundant Podcaster.
Google, by contrast, is pretty prodigious in terms of rolling out a lot of product offerings, and its openness has encouraged the proverbial thousand flowers to bloom e.g., site-optimized mapping functions have become endemic to many third-party sites, thanks to Google Maps. Critics note, however, that many of Google’s products are uninspired and unfocused from a product lifecycle perspective.
So, let’s look at Apple’s iPhone platform, and compare its prospects to those of Google’s Android.