Lock-ins need lockpickers

Dominic raised the issue of legacy documents while commenting on my previous post, on the disaggregation of the desktop.

Ric followed up with some comments relating to weaning enterprises off Microsoft Office.

This is something that has been bothering me for some years now, and the deja vu sensations weren’t enjoyable. And it got me thinking. Somewhere inside my head, there is no difference between my buying a song via the iTunes store and my creating a spreadsheet via Microsoft Excel.

With iTunes, everyone’s up in arms. Everyone understands that DRM of that sort is not a good thing. And people find ways of unlocking the music.

How come people don’t feel the same way about Office documents? Isn’t that a form of DRM? How come nobody objects? How come we don’t have clever people finding ways of freeing up such documents from their lock-ins? After all, there is a tangible measurable market for such migration tools. A huge market.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

The disaggregation of the desktop and what happens when lock-in disappears

Doc SearlsDoc Searls asks Can Apple clear the way for the Linux desktop? Along the way, he refers to two other articles that should be read as well, RoughDrafted’s Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop and Glyn Moody’s A Modest GNU/Linux Proposal for Michael Dell.

I don’t think it’s about Apple versus Microsoft versus Linux (choose your distro) any more, although Apple and Microsoft may prefer it was. Made life simpler for them, but not for us.

The A versus B versus C battles were still vendor battles. Battles about vendor platforms. Platforms defined by the particular breeds of software that were attracted to a given operating system, platforms that provided us with closed choices. Any colour you like as long as it’s theirs.

In the name of customer choice (Hobson must be turning in his grave hearing that barefaced lie) we had to choose. Vendors forced us into an A or B choice, leaving them happy and us not.

Now, the games are different. Especially since Apple went Intel, itself riding on the iPod effect. Now vendors can’t force us into an OR choice with mutual exclusivity. Now we have ANDs.

Why ANDs? Because the platform went and died in front of us. The platforms no longer seem to attract software on an exclusive basis. Much of what we see as software today gets released for Windows and OSX and Linux in parallel or near-parallel, so the operating system cannot define the platform any more. The bonding effect that was felt at platform level is now felt at platform-independent ecosystem level, making the community much more powerful. Mozilla is a community. Firefox is a community. Even StumbleUpon is a community. So is Netvibes. So for that matter is YouTube. Or Facebook. Or Skype. Or eBay. All communities.

The desktop was a platform. It’s disaggregated now, and the lock-ins of the past have shifted to freer ecosystems. The communities reflecting today’s realities aren’t like yesterday’s, which were non-overlapping mutually-exclusive walled-garden whatevers.

Snake oil doesn’t scale. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Today’s communities are open. They overlap, they nest, they merge and they split. They adapt, they mutate. They evolve. They are alive. Today it’s not about the desktop any more, it’s about the desktop and the laptop and the palmtop and the fingertip and the TV screen and the cinema and the phone and the PDA and the whatchamacallit.

Today’s ecosystems are open. Products and services migrate to where the action is, wherever there are conversations. The cost of migration is low, so low that you can see Say’s Law operate reasonably often. The dynamic of supply creating its own demand is something that gets quite exciting, when you couple it with democratised innovation and open feedback loops.

I think this is all good. When customer choice moves from OR to AND, when the customer has to sacrifice nothing to make this move, then good it is. [Well actually the customer has sacrificed a lot, it’s just been a different generation of customer doing the sacrificing…]

Which brings me back to Doc Searls. And VRM. Which is what will make lock-in disappear, and, not surprisingly, something that will really take off only when lock-in starts disappearing.

I’m going to enjoy watching that dam burst.

It’s been a long time coming.

Blinky and me

I started this blog a year ago today. Seems a long time ago. Is that good? No idea. You tell me.

Last night, I re-read About This Blog and The Kernel For This Blog, just to see what I’d learnt as a result of doing this.

I’ve learnt a lot. Particularly about Identity, about Intellectual Property Management and about the Internet.

I’ve learnt a lot about the grey areas around these Three I’s, largely as a result of your comments and suggestions.

The Three I’s that define what we can do with Information.

Which is what this blog is about.

So thank you everyone.

Matt GroeningAlso thanks to Matt Groening for making sure my sense of humour has an overlap with that of my children.

BlinkyWhich brings me on to Blinky.

The Three-Eyed Fish.

I think we all need to be like Blinky, three-eyed in our approach to information. Making sure we do the right thing about Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet.

Fraunhofer Lines

Wikipedia defines Fraunhofer lines thus:

In physics and optics, the Fraunhofer lines are a set of spectral lines named for the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826). The lines were originally observed as dark features (absorption lines) in the optical spectrum of the Sun.

The English chemist William Hyde Wollaston was in 1802 the first person to note the appearance of a number of dark features in the solar spectrum. In 1814, Fraunhofer independently rediscovered the lines and began a systematic study and careful measurement of the wavelength of these features. In all, he mapped over 570 lines, and designated the principal features with the letters A through K, and weaker lines with other letters.

A set of dark features in the optical spectrum of the Sun.

Hmmm.

A set of 574 dark features identified by Joseph von Fraunhofer.

The same Fraunhofer after whom a certain Fraunhofer Society was named.

The same Fraunhofer Society who invented MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, commonly referred to as MP3.

The same MP3 patents at the heart of the Microsoft/Alcatel-Lucent patent lawsuit.

The same Microsoft whose Chairman, Bill Gates, presciently said in 1991:

“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today…A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose.”

The same patent system that allows patents like this one:

United States Patent Application 20060259306
Kind Code A1
Roberts; Timothy Wace November 16, 2006

Business method protecting jokes

Abstract

The specification describes a method of protecting jokes by filing patent applications therefor, and gives examples of novel jokes to be thus protected. Specific jokes to be protected by the process of the invention include stories about animals playing ball-games, in which alliteration is used in the punch-line; a scheme for raising money for charity by providing dogs for carriage by Underground passengers; and the joke that consists in filing a patent application to protect jokes. A novel type of patent application, one that claims itself, and hence is termed `homoproprietary`, is disclosed.

Sean asked me what I thought of the Microsoft versus Alcatel-Lucent spat. Something I’ve been thinking about for a while. So what’s my answer?

Sean, I feel sad. I think we’re heading for a period of more and more intense patent lawsuits as the system crumbles under its own weight. I think we’re already at a stage where companies genuinely believe they have to have a bunch of patents in their armoury, in order to do battle with other companies with other patents in other armouries. I think we’ve already gone past the offensive/defensive/frivolous stage, we now have creatures like cross-patents and even self-referential ones.

I think there are people around who would prefer to employ patents rather than people.

And I think creativity will suffer as a result of all this. For a while.

As long as we have sets of dark features obscuring the Sun of our creativity, dark features that make up our broken patent system.