Mobilize- the Myth of Open (and why iPhone Developers should cheer for Android)

I'm here at the San Francisco airport waiting for a flight up to LA. It's late and I know I'm just going to hate myself in the morning but I just can't hold back.  Om Malik did a great job of putting on a very packed one day event. It is almost impossible to do a one day event justice but Om did it with a top notch team. And whomever ever was doing the AV and handling the back stage stuff? Go hire these people. They were amazing.

That's the good news.

I was on a panel with a number of my colleagues from the venture capital world. One of these fine folks was Matt Murphy from the iFund (KPCB).  Matt is a great guy, wonderful speaker, smart, and thoughtful. Except for one pesky item mentioned today. 

Matt's use of the word open to describe Apple's iPhone platform and the application store.  With the disclaimer that I'm one of the co-managers of the BlackBerry Partners Fund, my gut response: What utter nonsense.  Apple's platform is so far from open, I can't even begin to get my head around the comment.  Matt made the comment about Apple having a great developer relations group, helping all the developers with all this openness and love.  I should have pounced on this during the panel but, well, I didn't. I'm getting wimpy in my old age.

Michael Arrington said it best in a blog post recently when he said Apple (like Facebook, MySpace, and everybody else with a platform) can make any rules they want and developers will suck it up so long as the numbers are there to justify putting up with Apple's nonsense.  I have a number of portfolio companies doing iPhone apps and there is a single consistent theme, Apple is a giant pain in the ass to deal with but zero choice, gotta do it and deal with them.

RIM is more open. Microsoft is more open. Nokia is more open. Google and Facebook are more open. Apple? Open? Please.

But there is hope. Android.  Android is going to do "open" and have an "open" application store.  Today, Rich Miner from Google toned down the religious zeal and made the reasonable point that if nothing else, Android will bring some choice and an 'open' platform for others to consider. Once they launch, all the other guys will pile on with their version of open.

This, hopefully, will spur the Apple folks take it up a notch with respect to developers. Or not.

They may be quite happy being who they are today. Which is fine as long as other folks don't try to use a Steve Jobs reality distortion field on the term open. Apple is anything but open.

Good to see you Matt and well done, Om.

[Bonus note: I'm a VC, I really don't care. Bring me an application/service that can make you and me some good money and you can be closed, open, up, down, Android, Mars, Venus, Blackberry, Blueberry, or Strawberry. The point above was my brain having a serious cramp over the words Apple and open used in the same sentence.]

Comments

[Pete Warden]

I spent the last few years working for Apple with responsiblity for some third-party API developer support, and you are spot on. Apple has succeeded by steam-rollering developers and keeping the user-experience consistent. They drop legacy APIs without compunction, even if that causes howls of protest from third-parties making good money from them. We did our best to smooth out the ride, but historically Apple has gained a lot from keeping things very consistent for users by removing flexibility for developers. Many of their big applications have either very limited or non-existent plugin interfaces. Safari's UI is completely closed to third-parties, and that's the way Steve likes it.

Microsoft has always been fantastic to deal with as a developer, but you could argue that their openness has led to both very inconsistent user experience (all the different installers for example) and the security problems that still plague Windows.

[Martin Edic]

Apple is a business and they're quality freaks- is there something wrong with that? Open is not their thing because open can mean crappy and they are trying not to do crappy. Android will be interesting but phones are different than computers- they need standards for using networks and there are real security issues that it seems to me will restrict the openness of the OS.
RIM is open? You got to be kidding...

[rick segal]

Hi Martin,
I agree with your points with the exception of "open". As compared to Apple's "Open", RIM is "Open." Thanks for coming by.

>R<

[Vijay Chattha]

Totally agree. Apple is walled garden 2.0.