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According to conventional wisdom, Apple blew its first chance to dominate the computer industry. It missed out on becoming the 800-pound PC gorilla because its systems were too closed. Not just in the literal sense—the original Macintosh computers were sealed tight, so tinkerers couldn’t fool around with the guts—but in the licensing sense. That is, only Apple could make computers running the Mac operating system. Microsoft, on the other hand, licensed Windows to any old computer company—and today Windows runs 90 percent of the world’s PCs.
But then, a few years later, a second experiment ran, this time involving music players. Here again, both Apple and Microsoft used precisely the same playbooks they had with computers. In this corner: Steve Jobs, insisting on being the sole creator of both the iPod and its software. In that corner: Microsoft, offering its music-player software platform, called PlaysForSure, to any company that paid the licensing fee.
This time the results were reversed. The proprietary model triumphed—big time. The iPod gobbled up 85 percent of the music-player market. And Microsoft? It took PlaysForSure out behind the barn and shot it.
(Microsoft then ran a third experiment. It introduced a completely new music-player system, called Zune, modeled, incredibly, on Apple’s closed-architecture model. It failed, too.)
So we have several controlled studies with contradictory results. Which is the right approach? To license? Or to control?
Now we are engaged in a great market war, testing which model assures market dominance. It is the biggest test yet: the app-phone battle. This time the war is between Apple (iPhone, proprietary) and Google (Android, open).
Once again, Apple’s approach is to let only Apple make the hardware and software. Nobody else makes iPhones. Google, on the other hand, is taking the Microsoft “anyone can use our software” principle and running with it. Its Android phone software is not only open, it’s free. Any company can make an app phone (or tablet or e-book reader) using Android, without paying Google anything, and even make changes to it.
So far the experiment is shaping up magnificently. Companies all over the globe are pumping out Android phones—30 million and counting. Apple has sold 75 million iPhones, but it had a year’s head start on Google.
That makes Android a fantastic success, but as an experiment, this one is poorly designed. The question is: How much of Android’s appeal is its openness?
Truth is, you could argue that “open” makes the customer’s life miserable. It means that AT&T or Verizon can junk up your new phone with icons for their own ugly, overpriced add-on services. (Apple would never dream of letting third parties preinstall junkware on an iPhone.)
Worse, open also means that there isn’t one Android. It becomes a splintered platform of slightly modified versions. Just ask any owner of an Android phone who was excited by the possibility of playing Flash videos when Adobe finally released the necessary Android plug-in—and found that it would run only on a handful of Android models.
Google’s app store is more open than Apple’s, too; Apple, notoriously, employs human editors to approve each app individually. Among other things, that means that you can get porn apps on an Android phone but not an iPhone. But that also means that Apple’s store is better organized and higher quality than Google’s chaotic Android marketplace.
This is going to sound radical. But could it be that “open” is a great big fat red herring?
From the perspective of phone makers, is the openness really the attraction to Android? Or could it be that the greater draw is that Android is a complete, polished, elegant phone OS with built-in software library—and it doesn’t cost the phone maker a penny?
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17 Comments
Add CommentThere is no question that open is in. Look at all the consumers of Android. Motorola, AT&T, HTC, etc. Oh, you mistook the end user as the consumer for android. Well, Google tried that. I have a Nexus and I love it. I have the Trillian beta on it. I have Swype on it. I can put software on it that I want, whether or not someone payed $100 for the development fee to post it on the Android market. Why not write an article denouncing AT&T for locking up their Android based phones before passing them on to the consumer? Why not mention that not only is porn available on the android market, but that VLC is also, because GPL licensed software can be distributed on Android where it can't from Apple.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, yeah, I think someone storms into Verizon every day and says, "I want Swype! I don't care how quickly and smoothing the iPhone prints the wrong letter into my text messages!" Yes, I think the individual manufacturers realize that an app phone means different things to different people and they are less trying to lump every person into the same demographic. Also, yes, I think the consumers don't have any idea that open means that the process is open to AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint to mess up the devices they're being hawked. Perhaps if some people around here left the country every once in a while and saw how much better cell service works everywhere else in the world, they'd demand that AT&T et al. get out of our way.
"The iPod gobbled up 85 percent of the music-player market. And Microsoft? It took PlaysForSure out behind the barn and shot it."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk that made me laugh. Hard.
I tend to lean towards open architectures despite the attractiveness of the closed ones. As a web developer I appreciate the ubiquitous nature of Open Source platforms like PHP/MySQL. There is plenty of documentation which opens up avenues of innovation. Innovation is limited in closed systems. If you really think about it, Apple's innovation is limited to the function of the screen which was a purchased technology and not what Apple invented. The memory and processors in Apple products were built on common technologies. Open and closed systems are at odds with each other because closed systems to tend limit innovation to a chosen few.
I don't think you need look any further for the Open vs Closed systems.
"Open/closed" is an attribute of the a development proces, not an attribute of the product itself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately I can't read the full article, however just the opening seems highly biased.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"That makes Android a fantastic success, but as an experiment, this one is poorly designed. The question is: How much of Android’s appeal is its openness?"
Quite a lot actually. I didn't buy an iPhone because I wanted something that I could easily customize to my liking. Many friends of mine went out and upgraded to an Android based smart phone after seeing the flexibility of mine.
"Truth is, you could argue that “open” makes the customer’s life miserable."
Okay, argue it then. Rather than just saying it can, provide some examples to back up your claim. Without that, your statement is just simply postulation. There is no solid proof that having an Android based phone makes anyone's life miserable.
"It becomes a splintered platform of slightly modified versions. Just ask any owner of an Android phone who was excited by the possibility of playing Flash videos when Adobe finally released the necessary Android plug-in—and found that it would run only on a handful of Android models."
Ask any iPhone 1 user about the features of the iPhone 4. It's based on hardware limitations. The Android phones are being mass marketed to every price range, and so there is a phone built for each price range. iPhone's are marketed within the same price range upon release each and every time. Honestly citing that as a detriment is akin to picking up a netbook and complaining that it can't play Crysis on full settings.
Further, the complaints about the Android app market are seem to be based on the assumption that it's impossible to actually find a decent app for your phone. I find that quite ludicrous, as there's a rating system in place and you can read the comments from other HUMANS about the app itself. You make the mistake of not realizing that just because any app can be submitted that it will always be downloaded. Simply not the case, get an Android based phone yourself and look at the one or two star apps and how many downloads they have. The aren't popular or high rated because they aren't good, and thus very few people download them.
Just so it's not mistaken, I'm not an Android fanboy. Yes, I have a Droid X, but I do very much appreciate the well designed interface of the iPhone as well. If I wanted though, I could easily get a clone for my phone.
So the author likes the iPhone and feels threatened by Android. He thinks open platforms are not ideal because they're not like the iPhone's OS, and he's written an under-researched article to support that. *sigh*
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhich is quite interesting, since he uses an open platform to develop, publish and allow people to access all of that material. :) (we like to call it the Internet)
Pogue’s article is, unusually for him, poorly written and decidedly inaccurate. I am a Pogue fan normally but ......
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirstly Both Microsoft and Apple were implementing proprietary software, not open source software.
Secondly there is one reason and one reason only that Microsoft were victorious in the beginnings of the birth of the PC ca 1980. It was their deal with IBM to put MSDOS on every single IBM PC. Through this deal MSDOS and then Windows were assured pre-instalation on every PC and more importantly every business PC. By the time Apple arrived and entered the market the market was tied up and the competition finished. Pogue’s statement about whether Apple and MS were open or proprietary is irrelevant.
Thirdly 'Plays ForSure' was a logo certification program and not in any way comparable with Apple’s iPod. Microsoft had no device and no real system,. Pogue’s comments are yet again way off the mark and his use of terminology is confused and inaccurate.
In the present battle of the smart phones his terminology becomes slightly more relevant. However while he correctly states some of the advantages and disadvantages of Android and iOS he omits to point out the emerging security nightmare that is developing with Android which is so open and loosely controlled that apps are not being examined for malware and personal security in any meaningful way and already dozens of android apps have had to be removed after being exposed for accessing users personal details including bank and credit card details. The iOS is certainly more restrictive and closed in broad terms. But that brings reliability, coherency, version homogeneity and, more than anything, Security.
Does Microsoft provide the source code for Windows to users or software developers? Of course not - it's proprietary! To my knowledge only Unix and its derivatives provide operating system source code, fully encouraging extensibility.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIBM made Microsoft a successful operating system software vendor when they contracted MS to produce the operating system for the new IBM PC. It was then IBM's marketing power that made MS DOS a de facto standard. After that, MS had no reason not to port MS DOS to any PC manufacturer's platform who paid for the privilege.
The principal question for the electronics market is whether the the user demands extensibility and whether the operating system software vendor encourages other software vendors to develop products for their operating system. Apparently, there wasn't much demand for software extensions to IPODs.
That an operating system runs on multiple electronics manufacturers' products only benefits the purchaser to the extent that they can competitively select from multiple electronics vendors' platforms.
The author should not confuse these commercial product offerings with experiments, unless this article was merely an experiment in personal electronics marketing analysis.
I have the feeling this article is more than anything a social experiment. If no one else has noticed the trend, any article which denounces one smart phone over another tends to get many, many views. This could very well be a shameless attempt to increase traffic virally as both Android and iPhone fans come out to tout the gloriousness of their preferred platform in the comments section.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe most interesting experiment is being run right now - Verizon is offering iPhone and Android models side by side. I think the vast majority of phone users could care less about how open the source code is that runs their particular phone (how many users will ever study an API or actually write code?) - what they care about is functionality, user interface (elegance, ease of use, responsiveness), and reliability (as AT&T users can attest). It will be really interesting to see how the Android vs iPhone sales figures look a year from now - on the Verizon network.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA good point regarding open source, but the users may care about the availability and functionality of installed apps.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs you correctly point out, the proprietary network support for specific devices is probably the biggest issue limiting the competition among both network and device providers. These exclusivity agreements benefit no one except possibly the vendors - and probably not even them in the long run.
A big part of Android's success was that it had a successful design to copy. That design was not the result of an open source process. There has to be room for both open and proprietary if we are going to get the best from all quarters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthere are more differences between the two things being compared than the author is recognizing. I personally have always thought that Apple's failure in the PC space wasn't because of the open/closed question (though that didn't help).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe other two big differences between the Apple approach to hardware and it's competitor in the Macintosh days was backward compatibility. Apple took a purist engineering approach back then and if doing a "clean" design for their next generation meant changing the platform architecture around to the point that software for the previous macintosh version wouldn't even run on the new system, they didn't care. This is certainly the experience that caused me to abandon Apple in those early days. Anecdotal, yes, but nonetheless, I think this was likely a factor in their falling behind in personal computers in the early to mid 90s.
You are 100% correct a lot of stories on a lot of boards are rehashes, on some they even write reviews about old ship movies from years ago. They rehash, rewrite just to get people to comment and thus see advertisements perhaps. Or they can say to advertisers look how popular our site is we have thousands of people writing and viewing all the time. I didnt even bother reading whole story just skimmed and comments as even some of it is rewrites from 1980.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a scientist I can't agree with proprietary model. It is like publish a paper where you show only the conclusions, with no data nor analysis. It doesn't help the human kind evolve even when is good.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Liberté, égalité, fraternité"
I think this article ignores the experience of developers in determining the success of a platform, open or proprietary: in particular, developers throughout the world are drawn to Android development because it has the lowest 'barrier to entry'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou don't need to buy a Mac and an iPhone to build Android apps: the Android development kit is free and can be used on Windows, Linux or Mac -- and decent Android phones can be bought for much less than an iPhone. (The development kit for iOS is free, but you need a new-ish Mac to run it -- and, of course, an iPhone if you want to try out your app on real hardware and not just an emulator.)
Distribution of Android apps is not limited to an app store with a (sometimes frustrating and obfuscatory) review and certification process like it is for iOS, and you don't have to pay to join a 'developer program'. (The Symbian Ovi app store has become more successful, but I think it's fair to say that it got off to a very bad start with developers.)
Android applications are written in Java, not Objective C (iOS) or C++ (Symbian) and, I think, Java probably has more appeal to a wider range of younger developers: Objective C has a reputation of being weird and old fashioned, and C++ has the reputation of being difficult. The software libraries and APIs available for Android are at least as well designed and powerful as those for iOS, and much easier to use than Symbian. Again, the Android developer community and documentation is at least as good as for iOS -- and much, much better than Symbian. (The hope is that the Qt framework, highly popular f could change all this for Nokia platforms, but it hasn't happened yet.)
In other words (to state the blindingly obvious!) a platform is more likely to succeed and improve as developers are drawn to it -- open or not. Developers who find a platform easy and cheap to get started with, and likeable (or at least bearable...) in daily use, are likely to build apps that attract users, commercial interest and other developers to the platform. They build a community, improve documentation, and with feedback the platform becomes more stable, better designed, more powerful and polished for both the user and developer, and thereby more profitable and more widely deployed.
As a smartphone user who is not looking for games or music, I feel that the potential advantage over a basic, single-function mobile phone is the possibility of installing the apps I actually need - and, ideally, deleting those I don't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem with the i-Phone system is that, unless the operating system is hacked, it can only accept i-store-approved apps - and these are terribly limited except for entertainment.
If I want to store a routine for performing repetitive, multi-variable calculations on my smartphone, then either I get one of the many apps for Android,Symbian or Palm, or I get a choice of just 1 very limited RPN calculator simulator.
So my next smartphone will not be an i-Phone, despite its terrific user interface, but an open platform.
Pogue,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have respected you for quite some time. Yet by using Android as a representation of the free and open source community, you are staring at a single tree and concluding that all the other trees are the same and therefore you must be on a tree farm. In the jargon of this field, a hacker (uses in a positive sense) is someone who does care about whats under the hood of their devices, wheras a lamer pays no attention and is easily impressed by shiny baubles and superficial appearances. While you may know quite a bit about devices, this article shows that you fall into the latter category. Android is not fragmented, but forms a community together with the Linux project, a clear example that being open source leads to a better product. OSX is based around the open-source Darwin project. When hackers collaborate on a project, everyone with similar needs benifits. Free/open-source software unites and empowers users, proprietary software fractures them; just what Microsoft and its kin want. It's a myth that software development costs money. Bits are cheap and people can write code easily enough that there is no real need to pay for software. Since denand for software is finite wheras supply is infinite (despite what copyright laws and DRM want you to think), economically it should be free. Whether you code or not, you benifit in the end. I suggest you stop shelling out to advertisers with bold, empty headlines, pick up a few books on C and Linux, and join us instead of heckling one of the most successful community-driven projects in modern times and join the free and open revolution.
If you decline, there is nothing more to discuss.