Why Open?
Because Open changes the conversation. Open alters the way the game is played. Open is what customers want.
In the early 1980's IBM trounced Digital, who were far and away the leaders in the world of computing. Instead of focusing on the vendor-specific lock-in oriented architecture DEC employed, IBM launched the PC. By the standards of the time, the PC was an astoundingly Open platform. Rivals such as Compaq and HP were not only allowed but even encouraged to make compatible systems. The resulting business environment declawed Digital and left it a set of aging plaques and photos in an HP cafeteria. HP, on the other hand, leads the global manufacturing of PC compatible computers.
Linux repeated the pattern by unseating Solaris, which truly was the dot in dot-com at its height. Linux gave customers a choice. Linux runs on hardware offerings from everyone, not just from one vendor. HP has reaped huge benefits from this by making excellent server products and by ensuring that nothing closed is required to use them.
Prodigy and Compuserve sold walled gardens containing messaging and other online content. When their competitors started providing access directly to the Internet itself, it didn't take long for customers to choose Open over Closed, and they never looked back.
Closed gets us the DEC Alpha. Open gets us the PC division. Closed gets us Prodigy. Open gets us email. Which would you rather have?
At the moment, we have several majors players in The Cloud, each filling different roles, but each dominant and well established. Facebook is so strong in the social cloud, not even Google has dented it. What if Google adopted an Open platform for Google+ rather than simply making their own walled garden? Fighting one closed system with another isn't working out so far. The world is littered with the bones of those who competed by someone else's rules.
No customer has ever requested vendor lock in. On the other hand, every customer craves the freedom to do with their data as they please. So when a viable Open Standard emerges in a previously closed market, it doesn't take long for the flood gates to open and for the Digitals and the Suns and the Compuserves to come crashing down.
Without Open, the cost and overhead of battling the existing powers is prohibitively vast. Their technical prowess is massive, and they have had the benefit of learning to scale before any of their customers had any expectations of reliability. We no longer have that luxury.
What we do have: the ability to work together to change the playing field. We can collaborate with other companies such as Rackspace and NTT and Cisco to create compatible clouds, much as our predecessors created compatible Desktop Computers. We can standardize with our competitors so that, even while we allow our customers to move away from our cloud, we also help other customers move onto ours. We can create a market in aggregate more compelling than the one any single company can deliver alone. We can provide the service and the products and the experience that customers actually want. We can give them real options and real choices through Open standards that far outstrip any walled garden. We can continue being on the winning side of Open.
Why Open? Because Open always wins.
