McGuire’s Law

Yesterday, in the General Session of Sprint’s Application Developers’ Conference, company leaders made a number of comments meaningful to the open discussion.

John Garcia, Sr. VP of Product Management and Development, observed that the walled garden is challenged and carriers need to find a new differentiation path. He acknowledged that “open” has many different definitions, but that clearly openness is happening, whatever it means! He specifically called out the need for discovery and personalization.

Kevin Packingham, VP of Wireless Products, chose to contrast “managed” with “open.” He noted that Sprint hasn’t been “closed” and wasn’t thrilled with the “walled garden” metaphor either. He said that carriers have been focused on managing the experience for customers. Kevin pointed out that, unlike the Internet, when things break in the mobile experience, customers call the carrier.

Clearly Kevin is focused on opening up the carrier experience for developers and end users. He described dramatic changes in the nature of the “deck” and encouraged developers to make their applications and content easy to find in Sprint’s soon-to-come discovery and personalization interface. But Kevin also described the need to ensure that the protection that the “managed” environment provided is maintained as we move to an increasingly “open” environment.

The coming weeks and months should be fun to watch!

—————-
Now playing: Krystal Meyers With Josh Brown – King Of Angels

Today I’m coming home from Sprint’s Application Developers’ Conference. Yesterday I participated in two great discussions with forty of the smartest people in the industry. Thanks everyone for participating.

The discussion was about openness – what it means – is it good – what could be better.

Early in the first session, Epiphany Vera of Nellymoser quoted from a blog post by Nellymoser founder John Putterbaugh to define four factors to openness:

1. Open device OS and middleware
2. Open development
3. Open distribution
4. Open device network association

Another participant said that his company had identified twenty different distinct elements that could be opened. Any industry announcement on openness had to be carefully evaluated to understand which of those elements were changing from closed to open as a result of the announcement.

A third participant made the observation that openness means different things to different players in the ecosystem.

And a fourth said that openness means nothing at all, really because of all of the above. It is a term without clear meaning, so it means nothing.

However, this group was passionate about why openness could, nay should, be good.

Openness should increase choice for end customers. It should make it much easier for many more people to innovate in mobility, and therefore for lots of new options to become available.

Openness should increase profits in the industry. It should drive dramatic revenue growth and it should allow better margins for all players.

However, there are real and meaningful concerns about openness.

Openness could translate into infinite variations that the industry has to deal with. If developers need to develop for yet more platforms and derivatives of platforms, profitability and scale will be ever harder to achieve. If carriers need to support an endless array of apps on platforms, then care will become incredibly complex and expensive. Openness without standards could easily lead to chaos.

Openness and infinite choice could also fail to accomplish value for customers. Today, the carrier deck helps end users by presenting a small set of carefully selected applications and content. The choice is limited, but the discoverability is high and the choices can be trusted. As choices become unlimited, customers won’t want to lose the discoverability and trustability.

We all yearn for the promises of openness. I hope that discussions like we are having this week will help us achieve those promises and not succumb to the dangers lurking in the corners!