Business model with walls preinstalled

March 1, 2010 by David

The weird thing about a completely open platform based on open standards is that while no single vendor, such as Apple, can control the content or the standards, it can control its implementation. (And it caninfluence the content and the standards.) That’s all they need.

What Adobe and other business trying to control their product's market and their revenue fail to recognize is that the value exchange doesn't occur at the point where someone invokes their software. It occurs earlier in the viewing process when the viewer makes the decision that the content is worth their time.

Proprietary software isn't the way to maximize this exposure; standards based software is: in this case W3C's standards. If I can embed media into a page and not have to worry about Adobe's code, then I have greater certainty of the maximum number of viewers being able to participate in my content. By throwing off dependence on specific devices and writing for every device business increase the value of their content to the viewer.