The insistence on closed that seems so anathema to much
of the history of software development may in fact be a
good thing for the end user
Users are happy right now, but the time line of returns is significant. People will be unhappy about losing their music, or when they can't get important apps upgraded.
Closed systems generally aim to give you a capability quickly, but lock you in as they do. Open systems are often a dog to get working, but once you do you find the capability continues to pay dividends.
- Visual basic lets you create apps quickly but there's a lot of things you can't do, and your platform might be taken away from you.
- Microsoft word allows anyone to create small, well-formatted document with low training. But there's tooling lock-in, it's unwieldy to have many people work on documents, it's hard to transform your data.
- Iphone lets you get easy access to music and apps. But they won't transfer forever; long-term upgrade options are even more complicated than in consulting software because Apple would need to participate in maintenance.
Something we've seen with open platforms is that they move slowly but rarely lose ground. The PC architecture and unix are examples.
Closed systems generally aim to give you a capability quickly, but lock you in as they do. Open systems are often a dog to get working, but once you do you find the capability continues to pay dividends.
- Visual basic lets you create apps quickly but there's a lot of things you can't do, and your platform might be taken away from you.
- Microsoft word allows anyone to create small, well-formatted document with low training. But there's tooling lock-in, it's unwieldy to have many people work on documents, it's hard to transform your data.
- Iphone lets you get easy access to music and apps. But they won't transfer forever; long-term upgrade options are even more complicated than in consulting software because Apple would need to participate in maintenance.
Something we've seen with open platforms is that they move slowly but rarely lose ground. The PC architecture and unix are examples.