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Open or Closed?
Which is better, open or closed? The question is simple to ask, but not necessarily easy to answer. For one thing, open and closed aren't physical states, such as an open door versus a closed door. In the context of information technologies, open or closed refers to the way a product or technology was developed. You can't determine that development just by looking at the product in question.A closed, or proprietary, technology is developed in secret. Details about how it is made or how it works are kept a secret. Conversely, an open technology is developed publicly. Its technical details are shared freely with anyone who would like to know them. These two polar opposites represent the before and after perspectives of the information technology industry.Emotionally, the notion of working hard, developing something special, and then keeping it a secret so nobody else can profit is appealing. In some industries, collaborating with a competitor is self defeating. Consequently, the benefits of collaborating publicly with competitors on a new technology are not readily apparent.Take a closer look at the benefits and limitations of both open and closed approaches to technology development. Then you can better understand them and appreciate why TCP/IP might be the ultimate open technology.
The Case for Closed Technologies
The time-honored approach to creating an advantage over competitors was to secretly develop something and then jealously guard that secret. You created something specialyour competitors don't know how and buyers can only buy it from you. This approach is logical and intuitive. You invested your time and effort to develop something, so why give it away? Why let someone else profits from your efforts? When you look at closed or proprietary technology from that perspective, it seems quite logical and even fair. The business world is full of trade secrets, from McDonald's secret sauce to the Colonel's blend of secret seasonings. It's an accepted business practice, and keeping trade secrets provides real and tangible benefits.In fact, the first few generations of information technologies were created and sold under this mindset. One great distinction lies between secret recipes and proprietary computer technologies. Those proprietary technologies won't work with other products and other products won't work with them: They were designed to not interoperate with other vendors' products!
The Consumer's Benefits
The benefits of proprietary computing are few and easy to enumerate. This approach greatly simplifies the following things for consumers:Purchasing decisions.
If you pick Brand X, you pick Brand X for everything! Only Brand X has the cables that work with its computers. In a proprietary computer market, deciding to purchase a particular brand is a de facto decision to buy all peripheral parts, products, and supplies from the same company for as long as you continue to own and operate that computer system.Vendor management.
In an attempt to find something positive to say about such an approach to buying technology, it's that vendor-management duties are greatly simplified. You only have one vendor to worry about! Instead of trying to keep track of multiple vendors with different products and prices, you can deal with only one vendor that handles all your needs. Make one single call to a single vendor when you need new items.Trouble escalation.
Troubleshooting is greatly simplified in this instance. You still need to identify potential causes, isolate them, and test them one at a time until you found the problem's source. However, you never have to worry about your network vendor pointing the finger at your computer vendor and vice versa: All parts come from the same vendor! You can rest assured it all works together because it was all designed to work together.
Aside from this paltry list of consumer benefits, the benefits of a closed approach to information technologies accrue to the manufacturers.
The Manufacturer's Benefits
From the manufacturer's perspective, the consumer benefits listed in the previous section are nothing more than reflections of their own significant benefits.The total investment is so great that customers find it nearly impossible to change vendors. They have to scrap their entire investment to do so! Consequently, the customer becomes more a hostage than a customer.Think about it: A proprietary approach to a computer system is an all-or-nothing proposition. The customer loses all leverage over the vendor as soon as she commits to purchasing that vendor's products. Needless to say, this works in the vendor's favor with respect to negotiating prices. Thus, manufacturer efforts to create and maintain proprietary products are rewarded with healthy profit margins.Of course, anyone can buy one a product (a cable, for instance) and take it apart to figure out how it was made. That person could then manufacture his own version of those proprietary cables and sell them at a discount relative to the manufacturer's prices. Such practices, though not necessarily illegal, run contrary to manufacturers' goals of keeping their products tightly integrated and proprietary. Manufacturers fought this practice by declaring their warranties and maintenance agreements null and void if anything other than their own products were used.A proprietary approach to computer systems afforded manufacturers tremendous profit potential and long-term customers. They stubbornly fought and resisted efforts to circumvent their secretive approach. Yet, we know that this approach has faded into oblivion…at least within the world of information technologies! In its place is a radically different paradigman industry in which customers expect the products of different companies to work together perfectly.
The Case for Open Technologies
A technology intentionally developed to permit multivendor interoperability is known as an open technology. In the vast majority of industries, giving away your secrets can be fatal to your business. In addition, you just looked at the how the computer industry started out following that business philosophy.However, information technologies are a different story! You almost have to give away your secrets if you want any chance at all of making money from your newly developed product. That might sound like a paradox, and it is in some ways. It's an approach that works so well, however, that it became an almost subconscious expectation amongst the world's computer users.
The Benefits of Open Computing
The benefits of open computing platforms should be fairly obvious:Multivendor interoperability
The most obvious benefit of open computing has been this chapter's focus thus far: the ability to build a networked computing infrastructure from pieces mixed and matched from any brand you like. This allows you to pick the best of breed in each technology category, such as servers, printers, network switches, and so on.Price-based competition between manufacturers and vendors
The single biggest benefit of choosing technology suppliers is getting to shop around for the best product and the best prices. Unlike the days when you picked one manufacturer and became its hostage, today the consumer is in the driver's seat.Communications between different end systems
A subtle implication of multivendor interoperability is that with the right set of open standards, you can share data between computers that aren't connected to the same network. All you need is for some connection (however slight or indirect) to exist between the two networks and to agree on which protocol to use.
TCP/IP: The Ultimate Open Technology
By now you're probably wondering why so much ink was spent talking about open versus closed technical architectures. Rest assured this reason is good! You see, TCP/IP is an open technology. If it weren't an open technology, you might have an awful time trying to access your favorite websites.For example, when you access www.cisco.com, you don't care about the computing platform or operating system, nor do you care who developed the TCP/IP protocol stack that runs that website. Instead, you trust that you can access that website and all its contents thanks to the open standards that underlie the Internet's technologiesincluding TCP/IP.These days, you might tend not to think much about buying a TCP/IP protocol stack; it's just not a piece of software that gets purchased. There was a time, back at the dawn of personal computing's time, when you had to shop around, purchase TCP/IP, and then figure out how to install it. Today, TCP/IP is bundled into every computer operating system that gets sold. Thus, deciding where to buy your copy of TCP/IP is moot. Instead, you have to decide only which operating system and computing platform you like.
