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The Globe and Mail is a leading national newspaper and online publication in Canada. Visit www.globeandmail.com.

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Google Opens Up!

Written on
Nov 30, 2007 
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Globe and Mail  |
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Google Opens Up!



Is being “open” a competitive advantage – or could it become one? That’s just one of the questions raised by some recent moves that Google and others have made in the technology sector, both on the Web and in the mobile industry.

Google has launched a couple of noteworthy initiatives in the past few months, with one clearly aimed at Facebook – the hot social-networking site with what is (theoretically) a $15-billion (U.S.) market value – and the second aimed at the mobile phone business.

Both are interesting in themselves, but are most notable for what they don’t do.

The first is called OpenSocial, and it’s an attempt by the Web giant to create a kind of platform for social networking – one that would allow users of different networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn to move their data from one to the other, and to use applications or services that could draw from all of them.

More than one critic has compared Facebook with a “walled garden” – a social network that wants to keep its users inside the boundaries of its service, in order to control what they can do (and in order to sell advertising aimed at them). This is what you might call the America Online model.

Google’s model, however, is closer to the vision expressed by the World Wide Web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, in a recent blog post. In his commentary, Sir Tim describes his sense of where the Web is going and concludes that it is becoming more social.

In the beginning, he says, the Internet allowed computers to talk together without having to worry about cables or even location. The next revolution was the Web, which allowed documents to be shared without any complicated technology.

The next move, Sir Tim says, is to allow social data to move around and be integrated without any special software, something he says will allow a truly social Web to emerge.

Although Google wants to be the one to bring together companies to create the OpenSocial standard, the Web company isn’t interested in controlling the new platform, which is unusual for a large technology company.

Google is trying to do something similar with the mobile phone industry, through a venture it calls the Open Handset Alliance. It wants phone makers to agree to a common standard for applications and services that run on phones, so that they can interoperate more easily between different handsets.

In the case of the mobile effort, Google wants to do a bit more than just promote the standard: It wants handset makers to use its operating system, code-named Android – a Linux-based piece of software that would be able to run on virtually any modern handset.

Although Google obviously wants to compete with Apple’s iPhone and other devices, it’s interesting that it wants to do so by being open (its OS is open source, meaning the code is freely available), rather than forcing everyone to adopt a proprietary standard, as other software companies have tended to do.

On Tuesday, another company appeared to be making a bet that open might be a competitive advantage: Verizon announced that its network will support not just its own phones or devices, but any phone or device that meets a certain standard.

Skeptical observers say Verizon’s move may have a cynical side, since auctions for new 700 MHz spectrum licences are taking place in the U.S. soon, and Verizon could stand to gain by appearing to be open and accepting of competition.

Whatever the motivation, when combined with Google’s recent moves, it’s starting to look as though being open may be a more respectable competitive approach than it has been in the past.





Reader Comments.

One may say for sure that being open is an advantage. Think about the evolving niches, no content provider will be able to fulfill all that particular needs. So content syndication is key either to offer content or to get a higher market share. The latest steps of AOL are significant in this reach, too. The same is due to software. Especially enterprises may have particular and very different needs related to software. Being open offers the chance to engage the creativity of thousands of developers. Even marketing is going to be open trying to engage concumers. The whole internet is about openess and based on public available standards and as we know it is a great success.

Posted by mediablogger | 10:25 am on December 19, 2007.

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