Open Evolution

By Roderick Flores

Proprietary standards can bring success at first but cannot last. At least that is the conclusion we are forced to draw from two interesting articles in the 22 March issue of the Economist: Break down these walls and Everywhere but nowhere. I highly recommend that you read them particularly if you think that Ian’s Grid definition requiring open-standards is debatable.

The core lesson comes from the original big players in the nascent internet such as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. These companies provided their users with electronic mail (not necessarily what we consider email today), chat rooms, discussion boards, and access to a wide-range of information. However these services were restricted to users of each particular service. You simply could not access information from one provider if you subscribed to another.

However, it was not long before products based upon open standards that provided these same services (and more) became more attractive to users simply because they allowed people to venture outside of the closed communities to which they subscribed. Once these users got out, they never turned back. The original content-providers became nothing more than access points to the web. Consequently these service providers quickly lost their luster and thus their valuation. Only AOL was able to (and still struggles to) survive, having redefined itself as a web-portal with paid advertising – just like the services that nearly killed it.

Today, the hottest products in the digital world are the social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as virtual worlds such as Second Life. Their popularity and usefulness to individuals has given them significant momentum in the marketplace as the “next big-thing”. Consequently these companies have been given enormous valuations despite having no business model beyond the fact that they have hordes of captive-users. While these products typically come with an API so that users can add useful and interesting features, it is no substitute for true-operational freedom.  People want to interact others without having to switch systems or maintain two distinct profiles.

How long will it be before social-networking products appear that are not only based upon open-standards but also offering better features and more accessibility?  You can bet that it will be soon given the amount of potential money involved.  Then the reckoning will come and these companies, once flying high, will either be forced to adapt or perish.

What does this teach us about computing beyond the desktop, howsoever you wish to define it, be that a Grid, Cloud, or whatnot?  Personally, I think it is clear: we must develop to open-standards or perish. I cannot see how the Grid market is immune to pressures of interoperability and freedom of choice.  To paraphrase the Economist, why stay within a closed community when you can roam outside its walled garden, into the wilds of open computing!!!

I hope to see you all at the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference.