What has “open” done for me lately?

So I tuned in on the web yesterday to watch the session titled “The Open Mobile Competition Begins” at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit. It was an interesting panel with a rep from Verizon, Google, Kleiner, Frog Design, and Nokia (Full Disclosure: David Rivas from Nokia and I go back years to our days doing J2ME at Sun).

Let me see if I can summarize and still do the panel members justice: Verizon now seems to talk about “open” as a means to differentiate its corporate marketing (their actions to date stand in stark contrast to “open”). Google talks about “open” from the more traditional geek perspective as an almost religious dogma, while simultaneously running Android in a very non-open fashion and requiring early partners to agree to not change it too much. Kleiner is a frustrated VC, angry at the whole mobile space (and rightly so) and hopes that “open” may finally break the logjam. Frog is the content developer who doesn’t care so much about “open” but would love to deliver great designs to real users. Nokia has an actual business to support and talks about “open” more as a means to address specific business issues, like aggregating fractured developer communities.

I thought the constitution of the panel was perfect - as each member fervently addressed “open” from their own unique perspective. The one perspective that was curiously absent however, was that of the Customer. So let me try to add that here…

Verizon talks about “open” as attaching any device to the network and running any application I want on that device. Great. It seems to me they are asking to become a dumb pipe but that is their perogative. As the customer though, what’s my experience in discovering new content? How is the content tied into my existing billing relationship? What’s the experience when I switch from one device to another? Ralph de la Vega from AT&T said some time ago that AT&T is already “open” - as you can pop your SIM into any GSM phone and it will work on AT&T’s network. While this is technically true, and I do this all the time, go try to sort out a data plan. AT&T’s service reps will inform you that certain data plans are “required” for certain phones, and even better than that, you can only get certain data plans if you have a certain phone! I was in Europe as I often am, running up a large roaming data bill and had to lie to the AT&T rep that I was carrying an E61 just to qualify for the international data roaming plan to reduce my $700 roaming charges down to $90.

My point is that from the customer’s perspective, “open” doesn’t mean nearly as much, if anything at all. There is no better example than the iPhone. The iPhone is proprietary hardware, running a proprietary OS, with a proprietary application environment, with a proprietary discovery/provisioning process - and it is probably the best experience of any mobile device currently on the market. People’s only gripe is that they cannot necessarily get it on the network of their choice.

All of the panel members have points - but all too often we get into these debates about being “open” and what I’d really like us to focus on is the experience of the average customer. Having everything “open” does not necessarily address the customer experience, and if we’re not careful, we could all end up putting a lot of effort into “open” and still have the same unhappy customers.

And please don’t anyone tell AT&T I’m not actually carrying an E61 - my bill will go up substantially

Posted by Mark July 2008

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