So, Gruber thinks that Google’s The meaning of open blog post is the biggest pile of horseshit he’s ever seen from Google. I couldn’t disagree more.
The Google post is long. On first skim I can see coming away thinking it flip-flops. But the core principals in there are solid and clear. It lays out an alternative model for business that the general public often has trouble grasping: Open.
Business is proprietary, right?
Businesses exist to make money, plain and simple. I think I learned in eighth grade that a public company is beholden to generate money for its share holders. It’s one of the basic tenants of our form of capitalism. Like Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, “Greed is Good.” It drives people to accomplish and advance. But the faulty assumption tied up in these generalizations is that there is only way to make money: proprietary business models.
Proprietary products and standards have been one pathway to profit in the past. That doesn’t mean proprietary is the only possible guiding principle going forward.
Rising sea level is a good thing
People often wonder how a company like Google makes money when they give away so much for free. This post lays out the model. Google doesn’t aim to extract money out of their users by locking them into a perpetual software life-cycle. They aim to raise the sea level of technology.
As the technology improves and cross connects more lines of business open up and more folks gain access to them. Google’s slice of the pie grows far more than if they focused on grabbing the whole of today’s pie without regard to the consequences. In the process we get better technology.
Check out Doc Searls recent post Wanted: More Open Source Research for more on the value of open over proprietary. He does good job highlighting some real world A/B examples.
Black & white, and shades of gray
Open doesn’t always mean free. Open isn’t about altruism. Open is not an all or nothing game.
One thing is clear: the end goal for Google is profit. But in pursuit of that profit they choose to err on the side of open over proprietary. There are cases where they will swing towards the proprietary side. Ads and search algorithms are two examples in the post where they won’t open source code. On the other hand, they have released plenty of free tools for managing both ads and search. That feels like a fair mix to me.
It comes down to a different set of guiding principles. Proprietary has worked out well in the past. And maybe it serves other industries well. When it comes to technology in a hyperconnected age though, proprietary hinders advancement and it is limits consumer options. That’s why I’m excited to see Google outline their open guiding principles.