For example: Apple had long prided itself on being ‘closed’. Not many people questioned this ecosystem and attempted to make Apple ‘open’ until ironically they became commercially successful through iPhone/iTunes. So, do we say that it does not matter that systems are closed until they are successful (at which time we want them to be more Open)? Of course, there are some advantages to closed systems – for example they could be seen to be more predictable and more reliable.

So, if we extend the question more generically, we could ask ourselves: What factors govern the transformation of systems into platforms?

Here are some options. Interested to know if I have missed any:

a) Customers: Customers are often the main drivers to make a system open. For example, the desire to be able to send a text message to anyone in the USA from any network (which until recently, was not possible)
b) Regulation: Government regulation which causes systems to be more open: For example the FCC net neutrality debate
c) The providers themselves: Often over time, providers will try to be more open (ex the gradual opening up of Facebook to third parties)
d) Competitors: Many competitors will want others to be more open for commercial reasons. For example, companies who are not market leaders will want the market leader to be more open
e) Developers: Sometimes developers will want open systems but often they will be pragmatic enough to see where the money is i.e. will work with a relatively closed system if it is commercially viable

So, have I missed any other factors that govern the transformation of systems into platforms?

A major theme of the interview was his 2008 report titled the “Evaluation of Ten Standard Setting Organizations with Regard to Open Standards” (full pdf here). The report, that was commission by the Danish Government, seeks to evaluate and compare the openness of 10 Standards Setting organizations. A summary of the report can be found here.

Other topics addressed during the interview are SSO Governance, Open Standards as well as the role of government in the standards setting process.

Interview for Talkstandards.com with Per Andersen, Managing Director IDC Nordic and Benelux

Talkstandards [TS]: Your report, “Evaluation of Ten Standards Setting Organizations with Regard to Open Standards”, was a result of the Danish parliament’s adoption of a 2006 resolution to ensure the public sector’s use of open standards. Would you say that this was a political reaction to the increased use of informal standards, particularly in the ICT industry? If so, why do you think that this has happened in Denmark?

Per Andersen [PA]: As with many political decisions they are not necessarily based on a purely technical rationale – as politicians are not expects in IT. In this case one particular party made “open standards” a key political issue, based on what I believe was a combination of lobbyism from open source communities and a genuine interest in trying to ensure increased software interoperability. It took some time for them to get support for the agenda, but at the end they succeeded as no other party wanted to support “closed, proprietary standards” of image reasons.

TS: What do you see as the driving motivation behind the increased government interest in open standards, and particularly the interest in the industry-driven standardization process?

PA: The initiatives around open standards are an extension of the government “OIO” (“Public Information Online”) which was started in 2001 with the objective of creating common platforms and the possibility of exchange of data across all public organizations. It was natural for the National IT Agency to start promoting the use of standards (such as XML) in the public sector. Therefore, the government is looking for widely accepted standards – which in reality are often industry defined standards, although the government does not have a preference for such standards per se.

TS: In your report, you evaluate and compare ten standard setting organizations based on their degrees of openness both within the organization themselves and consequently the products they deliver. How did you initially tackle this problem and did you face any difficulties when setting the comparison criteria?

PA: Fortunately, some research had been done in this area, such as by Ken Krechmer. The challenge was to make a number of abstract criteria operational so that they could be tested against the actual realities of SSOs. In this process we tried to frame the criteria by looking at what SSOs of various types were actually doing.

TS: An ongoing theme throughout the report is the difficultly faced when comparing these organizations based on openness. Where does this difficulty arise?

PA: The major difficulty, which relates to the previous question, is that “openness” is a very loosely defined quantity. At the same time, any SSO must be open in some way or form – if standards are secrets, not documented or not supported, they will obviously not be adopted – which is not at all the intention of the SSO. So, it basically came down to comparing “nuances of openness” or basic principles of the interpretation of “openness” – which can be questioned as meaningful.

TS: What qualities or attributes of openness are regarded as most important? Can you identify how the focus of which qualities are considered important shifts between different end users (e.g. public sector, industry, consumers)?

PA: In reality, the only major difference is found in the IPR area. Here the opposite attitudes towards “free IPR” versus “licensed IPR” were very visible between various organizations. However, it is not necessarily a question of “openness” but is a quite different discussion about innovation and business processes – yes, one can have an opinion about this, but I don’t see it as “open” versus “closed”.

TS: How does the differences in openness across the compared SSOs relate to their internal governance?

PA: First of all, SSO’s governance can be more or less documented. But the fact that it is not fully documented does not necessarily mean that they do not operate in an open way. In fact we found examples of more open organizations with less formalized documentation of this. Secondly, even if the governance is documented there is no guarantee that the organization is actually behaving according to the governance. So, another challenge was to evaluate how SSOs are operating versus the actual formal governance.

TS: Within your report you discuss that there is a lot of variation in how different SSOs face the tradeoff between open and closed membership in regards to funding. How does this tradeoff affect both openness and governance?

PA: There is a fundamental conflict between “openness” and “financing of activities”. If all activities are free (which some consider for the ultimate “openness”) it is difficult for the SSO to finance a professional body with publications, testing, consultancy etc. On the other hand, if membership has a fee or services must be paid for, some will accuse the SSO for not being “open for all”. Most SSOs in reality have found a balance between the two extremes, and I don’t believe a totally “free SSO” can be effective. Therefore the relationship between “free access” and “openness” can be questioned.

TS: Following the publication of “Evaluation of Ten Standards Setting Organizations with Regard to Open Standards”, what feedback did you receive? In particular, how did the Danish Government, who commissioned the report, respond to the findings?

PA: It must be understood, that the report was commissioned because the government was caught in a hot political discussion of ODF and OOXML and whether to allow both or just one of them. At the end the government decided – to much regret for open source lobbyists – to allow both document standards to co-exist, at least for a period of time. This study was one of the arguments why both standards actually met the requirement, decided by the parliament, that standards in the public sector must be open. The decision about the two co-existing document standards was re-evaluated recently, but the government did not reverse the previous strategy.

TS: Let’s conclude with a forward-looking question: Will we see governments increasingly dictating the rules for standard setting organization governance? Will this development be legitimate or, as we have seen with official standards bodies, will this simply reduce efficiency through competition?

PA: I have been a market analyst for 20 years. I have always found it intriguing when governments have tried to dictate market behavior – and I really have difficulty finding examples of when this has been a success, while there are many examples of the opposite. Following on from this, I seldom find it a good idea when governments try to impose rules in areas where market dynamics are much better instruments to achieve the goals.

Per Andersen Biography: Since 1996, Per Andersen has been the managing director for IDC Nordic. With a total staff of 30, IDC Nordic has offices in Copenhagen and Stockholm and is the leading provider of ITC market intelligence in the region. Since 2007, Per Andersen is also managing IDC Benelux, located in Amsterdam, with a total staff of 20. From 1996 to 2006, Per Andersen also managed IDC’s European Software Market Research Centre. From 1990 to 1996, Per Andersen was the manager of IDC’s European Unix and Client/Server Centre publishing market research reports on the European market to IT vendors and users. In addition to this, he has been responsible for starting up IDC’s Internet/intranet research in Europe. As one of IDC’s lead analysts on the European markets for software, IT services, Internet, eBusiness, servers and open systems, Per Andersen has been presenting at a wide range of conferences world wide, and his opinions are highly regarded by the press. Per Andersen holds a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from University of Aarhus, Denmark.

1) When governments favour one or the other standard/company, as they did for Baidu in this case, the results are never good. We need competition and market forces to drive innovation. The current state of play in China is: we have no competition in the search engine market and hence potentially little incentive to innovate (even at 33 %, Google’s market share was substantial). The customers are the real losers.

2) International factors are more complex. To its credit, Baidu claims that it had a greater understanding of the local market. Also, China is not the only market where Google has a low market share. That distinction goes to the Korean market with Naver which has a market share of over 70 %, compared to 2 % of Google – which demonstrates that there may be some merit in the complexity of local/non English claim which Baidu makes

3) Search engine technologies are mostly proprietary. No one talks of ‘open standards’ for search engines. The only known instance of an open algorithm search engine Wikia search which called itself ‘a free and open-source Web search engine operated by ‘for-profit’ company’ died a lonely death with 0.000079 % market share.

4) Finally, as we know from the Telecoms industry, China has tried to influence standards in the Telecoms domain roaming by promoting TD-SCDMA instead of the more widely used W-CDMA standard. This leads to practical difficulties – for example for roaming customers.

To conclude, China – Google offers an extreme example of Government involvements in ICT roadmap but the same happens to a lesser degree globally. Ultimately, that cannot benefit the customers.

Everyone seemed to be saying If ‘Open is good’ – but then how come we all go to ‘Closed’ (iPhone?). This curious paradox underpinned the conference – and the answer to me lies in the distinction between a platform and an ecosystem.

I believe that: A ‘closed platform’ works provided you have an ‘Open ecosystem’ BUT an Open platform (open source and / or open standards) without an ecosystem (open or closed) does not work.

To put this in perspective:rna) In this context, ‘Open’ was largely referred to in terms of ‘Open source’ and ‘Open standards’ for example: Android is Open source; Opera follows open standards; Symbian is now open sourced etc etc etcrnb) ‘Ecosystem’ is defined in terms of third party developers as in ‘The iPhone has a vibrant ecosystem since third party developers flock to it’rnc) By ‘Ecosystem’, We are referring to a business model i.e. the litmus test is: Can third party developers make money?

It seems that finally, everyone within the Telecoms industry agrees that third party developers are essential to a vibrant ecosystem (something that Google, Microsoft and Apple have known for a long time). In a recession, I think a vibrant, open ecosystem which benefits third parties is a good development and should be encouragedrnHere are some observations and contradictions in relation to Open:rna) Vodafone talked about their appstore – but not if revenue share is 70/30 (They did say it will be broadly consistent with the industry)rnb) Brands prefer closed platform (iPhone) but like the relatively open ecosystem (from Daniel Rosen Managing Director of AKQA) rnc) The Mozilla Fennec mobile browser was deployed on the Windows mobile platform as were some of the initial HTML5 featuresrnd) Google Chrome is not a W3C standard – but architecturally one of the most innovative browsersrne) All agreed that HTML5 is great and is ‘getting there’ – but I believe that an exception is not a standard. At the moment, HTML5 is a loose conformance and an agreement but yet cannot be called a standardrnTo conclude my view is:

If we define Open in terms of a vibrant commercially viable ecosystem for third party developers (and that definition makes sense since it is pragmatic in a recession), then I believe that: A ‘closed platform’ works provided you have an ‘Open ecosystem’ BUT an Open platform (open source and / or open standards) without an ecosystem (open or closed) does not work.

A viable third party developer ecosystem may be far more important than other forms of  ‘Open’ – specifically Open source or Open standards, especially in a recessionrnThoughts?

Originally published at Opengardensblog and reproduced with the author’s permission