David Gumbrell brings up an interesting point while commenting on a recent post. I had asked the question why people saw iTunes as DRM but not Word. And David said:

I have a suspicion that it’s because people buy iTunes with their own money and MS Office with their employer’s.

This is not about Microsoft per se, or even about Apple. It’s about lock-ins. Now there are many reasons why enterprises buy lock-in products and services:

• The only game in town: In this instance a vendor has a real or virtual monopoly, elects to protect it, and enterprises want what that vendor offers. Lock-in wins. Victims don’t feel too good about it, but at least they understand it.
• Your problem, your solution: Here the enterprise IT decision makers elect to outsource management of the problem, whatever that problem is, and are prepared to live with lock-in provided the problem is solved. Also understandable. And not that painful either, on the surface.
• Stockholm syndrome: In this case the lock-in provider has excelled, the customer is so delighted with the product or service that he pretty much asks for the lock-in, it becomes a security blanket for him. Sometimes that security blanket helps him forget what he’s done, but most of the time he’s happy as Larry. Understandable and apparently pleasurable. Sometimes linked to the fact that decision-maker skills are deeply embedded in the architecture of the lock-in merchant.
• Because it works, stupid: This is the enterprise norm. A selection is made with clear and present lock-in, with the defence that it’s the only solution that works soup-to-nuts. Pragmatism rules OK. Exacerbated by devolved decision-making, which allows people to concentrate on the benefits without worrying about the costs.

I am sure there are many other reasons that people buy lock-in products. Why am I so hung up about these products? I guess I just don’t like having to pay tons of money to try and free up my own information, to move it around, to manipulate it, change it, enrich it, whatever. Especially if the end result is that nothing works anyway.

That’s what DRM 1.0, otherwise called EAI, felt like. Maybe David Gumbrell’s right. If the decision makers don’t feel the pain of their decisions, they will continue to make strange decisions. Incentive misalignment.

I still live in hope, though. Even if my generation puts up with this nonsense, I cannot see Generation M doing it.

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.

Doc 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.

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.

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

Which 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.

The Shape of Things To Come? I hope not.