Staying Closed Will Doom Kindle to Obscurity and Failure
Editor's Note: MobileReader anurag brought this to us yesterday, but I felt like it deserved a front-page treatment.
O'Reilly Publishing is a familiar name around here. Its founder, Tim O'Reilly, has a very interesting commentary on the present and future state of Amazon's Kindle if they remain a closed system. I suppose you could call it O'Reilly's law of e-cono-dynamics, and it echos one of Newton's laws: A closed system will eventually fail.
You can find O'Reilly's commentary over at
Forbes' site. What makes his thoughts so interesting to me is not just the simple fact that he's deeply involved in
successful e-publishing, but that he talks about seeing this sort of thing play out once before. Specifically, he talks about how Microsoft tried to establish a closed e-cono-system with what became their MSN:
Quote:
... I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform.
The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser.
While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day.
In fact, the year before, we'd launched The Global Network Navigator, or GNN, the world's first Web portal and the first Web site supported by advertising. To jump-start GNN, we hosted and sponsored the further development of the free Viola web browser, as a kind of demonstration project. We weren't a software company, but we wanted to show what was possible.
Sure enough, the Mosaic Web browser was launched shortly thereafter. The Web took off, and MSN, which later abandoned its proprietary architecture, never quite caught up.
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O'Reilly then goes on to draw a parallel between that situation and what's going on with Kindle and e-Pub, referencing Stanza and O'Reilly's own
Bookworm reading application which we
heard about last week.
The gist of it is that Amazon is in a similar position with e-books that MSN was in fifteen years ago with the web. MSN tried to fence folks into their version of the web, just as Amazon is trying to do with their version of e-reading. We know how well that particular gambit worked out for Microsoft, and O'Reilly sees the same thing happening to Amazon, if they sacrifice their product's usability to maintain control of how it's used.
O'Reilly already sees this pattern beginning to repeat for Amazon, with the advent of ePub format, and platforms that, unlike the Kindle, support it.
It's a very interesting read, and I encourage you to
pop over and have a look at the full column (it's not all
that long).
What he says makes a lot of sense to me, I'm interested in hearing others' perspectives on it as well. Please join the
discussion already in-progress over here.