Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Social Software Lock-in Comment [] • Trackback [] • Google It! • 9:23:46 AM • Dare Obasanjo writes a follow-up to Adam Bosworth's what is the platform? post. Adam's point (and Dare agrees) is that we're seeing a shift from software platforms to platforms that are about community access, collaboration, and content. The implication appears to be that web-based service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo will rise in importance, as the actual software platforms of old (Linux, Mac and Windows) loose their relevancy as they become mere access points to the web. Dare makes the following interesting point: The interesting thing about the rise of social software is that this data lock-in is migrating from local machines to various servers on the World Wide Web. One should not underestimate the consequences of this. Over the last few years, people have complained about the application data lock-in, meaning that they're locked into an application and can't migrate to using another because they can't port their data to the other application's format. In the next few years, people will realize that in terms of lock-in, the web has the potentail for much greater lock-in. In software lock-in, you own the data bits. You can do whatever you want with them, including porting them to another format. If you can't do it yourself, you can probably find someone who can. In fact, this has already happened for the most successful application: all word processors, for example, come equipped with an import facility that allows them to read and use the competition's data format. On the other hand, if all your data lives on the web, you're at the mercy of your service providers. If Yahoo goes down tomorrow, all your mail messages that they keep for you on their servers will be lost. Same for your IM contact list, the stock portfolio you track, etc. Consider this: many people use web services because they're free. It's nice that you can get a 1GB mailbox from Google without paying anything. Some providers (such as MSN), will let you backup some of this data locally (for example, by using IMAP4), but only if you pay them a fee. What happens if providers decide that advertising doesn't make enough money for them, and start charging twice as much for allowing you to take your data elsewhere? Will you still be glad that you made a "deal" with the provider in which you paid it nothing and so it is under no obligations to give you back your data?

© Copyright 2004 Ziv Caspi.