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Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? Remember that üb

Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network? How about widely used programming languages and frameworks? Flash for cool web effects anyone? The web is open, open wins. No matter how monolithic a market leader is, if it can't figure out how to be open and make money: it will succumb.

coldtea 12y ago
>Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. The only lesson from history is that all tecnologies succumb at some point. General infrastructure standards (like TCP/IP or HTTP) persist longer, but that doesn't say much for application level technologies. >Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? If anything that's a counter-example. Netscape, that "now has less than 10%" is the open source version. It had that 90% when it was proprietary. Besides, the current 2 big players that trump Firefox in users (Chrome and IE) are proprietary too. >Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network? Yeah, it got pwned by Apple and Android. Of which Apple, which is proprietary, has most of the smartphone profits, and Android has a lot of the share, mostly in lower cost phones. Not really about open vs closed. Meebo, a totally open phone never got anywhere, and neither did Mozilla's phone attempts. >Flash for cool web effects anyone? What about it? It dominated its niche of the market for like 15 years. If it dies its mostly because of general incompetence by Adobe. They never managed to create a mobile version that doesn't suck donkey's balls for one. They also died because a proprietary platform make a decision not to include it (iOS), which is not really about "open" winning.
- bikamonki 12y ago
  The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this. >And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards. Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but de-facto standards too, from the .doc format to .mp3 (patent encumpered), to GIF and h264.
    - bikamonki 12y ago
      The logic is this: you are taking a picture while I see the whole movie. So, Apple is winning 'now', so is Whatsapp, but they may lose it eventuallly b/c they are closed models.
      - axisK 12y ago
        They could fail for hundreds of different reasons, not all necessarily related to being open or closed.
      - epistasis 12y ago
        But this is a faith-based attitude; the reasoning and evidence you presented could just as easily be used to support a "closed eventually wins" argument, where any open platform that's currently winning is only doing it temporarily until a closed platform dominates.
      - coldtea 12y ago
        Even if so, some closed product winning now (in this "frame of the movie") is not evidence that open will eventually win, as you said above. Besides, how "I'm talking a picture while you see the whole movie"? The case of browsers I mentioned, for example, spans 2 decades+ that closed browsers dominate. Or take desktop operating systems: closed ones are winning for 5+ decades. That's a whole lot of pictures. I don't think there's a historical based argument you made for how the movie ends, besides your faith in a particular outcome.
jshevek 12y ago
We are still in the early days of computer technology. There may be thousands of examples from the last 50 years that support your line of thinking here, but I'm not convinced that this will be true, always, in the future.
- bikamonki 12y ago
  I agree, mine is a naive forecast. But something tells me that users/markets don't like to be kept walled: they slowly but surely migrate to the better alternative (I guess we must thank hipsters for leading). It seems that the better alternative disrupts b/c it offers true value, real improvement. Then it grows like crazy, then it gets greedy and tries to hold the mass...but the mass is like sand.

coldtea 12y ago

>Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. The only lesson from history is that all tecnologies succumb at some point. General infrastructure standards (like TCP/IP or HTTP) persist longer, but that doesn't say much for application level technologies. >Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? If anything that's a counter-example. Netscape, that "now has less than 10%" is the open source version. It had that 90% when it was proprietary. Besides, the current 2 big players that trump Firefox in users (Chrome and IE) are proprietary too. >Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network? Yeah, it got pwned by Apple and Android. Of which Apple, which is proprietary, has most of the smartphone profits, and Android has a lot of the share, mostly in lower cost phones. Not really about open vs closed. Meebo, a totally open phone never got anywhere, and neither did Mozilla's phone attempts. >Flash for cool web effects anyone? What about it? It dominated its niche of the market for like 15 years. If it dies its mostly because of general incompetence by Adobe. They never managed to create a mobile version that doesn't suck donkey's balls for one. They also died because a proprietary platform make a decision not to include it (iOS), which is not really about "open" winning.

bikamonki 12y ago
The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this. >And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards. Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but de-facto standards too, from the .doc format to .mp3 (patent encumpered), to GIF and h264.
  - bikamonki 12y ago
    The logic is this: you are taking a picture while I see the whole movie. So, Apple is winning 'now', so is Whatsapp, but they may lose it eventuallly b/c they are closed models.
    - axisK 12y ago
      They could fail for hundreds of different reasons, not all necessarily related to being open or closed.
    - epistasis 12y ago
      But this is a faith-based attitude; the reasoning and evidence you presented could just as easily be used to support a "closed eventually wins" argument, where any open platform that's currently winning is only doing it temporarily until a closed platform dominates.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      Even if so, some closed product winning now (in this "frame of the movie") is not evidence that open will eventually win, as you said above. Besides, how "I'm talking a picture while you see the whole movie"? The case of browsers I mentioned, for example, spans 2 decades+ that closed browsers dominate. Or take desktop operating systems: closed ones are winning for 5+ decades. That's a whole lot of pictures. I don't think there's a historical based argument you made for how the movie ends, besides your faith in a particular outcome.

jshevek 12y ago

We are still in the early days of computer technology. There may be thousands of examples from the last 50 years that support your line of thinking here, but I'm not convinced that this will be true, always, in the future.

bikamonki 12y ago
I agree, mine is a naive forecast. But something tells me that users/markets don't like to be kept walled: they slowly but surely migrate to the better alternative (I guess we must thank hipsters for leading). It seems that the better alternative disrupts b/c it offers true value, real improvement. Then it grows like crazy, then it gets greedy and tries to hold the mass...but the mass is like sand.