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Have Walled Gardens Killed the Personal Computer?
theodp writes "Harvard Law School Prof Jonathan Zittrain explains in The Personal Computer is Dead why you should be afraid — very afraid — of the snowballing replicability of the App Store Model. 'If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens,' warns Zittrain, 'we'll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we'll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.' Searchblog's John Battelle, who's also solidly in the tear-down-this-walled-garden camp, adds: 'I'm not a nerd, quite, but I'm sure angry.'"
I haven't RTFA, but the instant question is: So what?
As long as a device solves a problem to the user, that's what the device should restrain itself to do.. General use PCs have proven to become virus/worms/problem infested in the hands of "normal" users..
There will always be general use pc's for those who are willing and have to skills to handle them responsibly..
I for one welcome this new era when tech support nightmares get reduced to a minimum..
This is why we have free software and open source software.
So that we're not bound by the whims of some business model.
You're still free to use any other framework or do your own. Hell, if we make that argument then Linux would be walled garden too. But in both cases you are still free to do what you want, if you want. In true walled garden (like iOS) you are not.
With Apple, you get a walled garden where Apple controls what apps are allowed. The apps are high quality but developer control is lost. With Android, it's the "wild wild west" where anything you want to create can get sold. And it shows. I see the new apps each day for Android and most of it is pure trash. Honestly, how many bikini apps need to get released each day? The upshot here is that anyone can create anything and sell it for Android. There is always a tradeoff.
I prefer repositories. You can't really be walled in, because you can just add some other repo in and have all those packages too. It's not like it's so hard to navigate either, it's just that most package manager frontends remain very technical, maybe excepting the ubuntu software centre(?).
It always finds a way.
Simple solution: don't buy Apple.
(I honestly don't even know if I'm trolling with this statement or not anymore)
The PC is not dead its just that common end users are driving up the shut-up-and-take-my-money model. the PC will end up being left to the geeks again which is probably the same small percentage of people (compared to the entire pc market space right now) it was back in the late 80s. the only reason common end users bought pcs was to get on the internet. they have other ways to do that now without having to learn anything. internet access has acheived the easiness of the VCR and thats what most people want who are not geeks.
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Market power can be just as limiting as government power. If nobody's making anything else because the walled gardeners have sewn up the market, what are you going to do?
Think about the phrase "personal computer."
How many people do you know who really need a completely general-purpose computer that they own and control personally?
How many "PCs" are actually nodes in a centrally controlled system, and not "personal" at all?
Because of the economics of making "PCs," we have the illusion that hundreds of millions of people buy and use "personal computers" each year. In reality, a minority, possibly a small minority, of those people actually take advantage of anything those "PCs" do that would require personal control over a general-purpose computer.
This is the reason mobile devices that are not quite "personal computers" are rightly popular. They serve the actual need. Hopefully, it will be possible to use mobile devices as if they were personal computers, so that the potential of personal computers can be applied to a networked, mobile world.
I wrote parts of this stuff
All of this will happen again.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, online services were walled gardens. There were of course minor exceptions - BBSes who all exchanged information with each other via FidoNet. But the big names were CompuServe, GEnie, MSN, and (what would eventually become the 900 lb gorilla) America Online. They had their day, until the Internet tore down those walls. Today, all those services are pretty much gone. MSN is no longer a subscription service. AOL is still hanging on, mostly due to monthly service revenue from old people who don't know that they can get their Internet without having to pay AOL.
I think what happens is that when a new type of service/product is created, the initial creators and early copycats end up with most of the market share. Then they try setting up walls to protect their gardens and preserve their market share. Eventually an open alternative comes along which works better and/or is as easy to use, and the walls fall. Arguably, something similar happened in the 1970s/1980s with computer operating systems. Each computer maker had their own OS with its own ecosphere and apps. Eventually, MS-DOS ended up winning the market not because it was the best, but because it (and the PC platform it ran on) was open.
I suppose it's possible that, eventually, some company could "get it right" and preserve their walled garden in perpetuity. I'd argue Facebook is much closer to this than Apple.* But based on history, the safe bet is against any company managing to pull this off. Eventually something bigger and better comes along which consigns the original giant to a niche, if not irrelevance. *(Google is open enough that they allow you to extract the data stored in their services - their walls rather porous.)
The one market where I haven't seen this happening is gaming consoles. But I think that's because the nature of game compatibility/hardware and the refresh cycle forces the entire industry to "reboot" every few years. First it was Atari, then Nintendo, then Sony, and currently it's split between Nintendo (Wii) and Microsoft (Xbox). The amount of time between these reboots is short enough that an open platform can't develop. But the reboots also mean that each company has to start over from scratch every few years to maintain dominance.
To use a car analogy, most people would prefer a car which they got in and travelled from A to B, without having to know anything about oil levels, brake pads, shock absorbers or what a cam shaft is for. Petrolheads would say "But you can have so much fun by tinkering with the engine!", to which the majority of car drivers would reply "But I don't care about any of that, I just want to get to my destination. Give me a zero-maintenance car please."
No, to use a car analogy, they don't want to have to deal with things like learning traffic rules and regulations or having to use signals or a brake.
And they don't want to go from A to B, they want to go from A to "I don't care, but entertain me!".
They want a car with a chauffeur and all their friends in it, and where they don't decide the next stop. I.e. a tour bus.
The key difference is that a framework is a tool, whereas an App Store contains, or, more to the point, doesn't contain specific content.
If I use jQuery, that doesn't restrict what other code I write, or what other applications I use.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
The argument that "you can always use Y if you're not satisfied with X" is a fallacy in the world of computers. The laws of market, especially in a market with high initial and near zero variable cost, contradict it. Allow me to elaborate.
The main reason why hardware has become (comparably) cheap in the last few years is the fact that the development cost, which are pretty much the whole cost of any kind of hardware (let's be blunt here, it ain't the epoxy for the board and the silicon for the chip), could be spread out over more units. Do you think CPUs could be sold at less than ten times the price if the market for computers was as big as it was three decades ago? It's even better visible in software, it's by no means ten or hundred times as much of an investment to produce specialized business software compared to some games, the market is just considerably smaller.
Saying now that if I'm not happy with X I could always use Y doesn't work out for exactly this reason. If everyone else switches over to X, forcing the maker of Y to either fold or increase the price for Y, I will be forced to use it as well or not use anything altogether. I will not have the option to continue using Y. Because I alone do not allow the development of Y to continue.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Zittrain's been peddling this load of manure argument for a long time now, and as far as I am concerned he has been consistently disproven time after time. It's not that what he points out is not a factor, so much that he ignores the rest of the story, which is that the "generative spirit" continually finds ways to break down the walls, create alternatives, and generally keep innovating despite (and at times, because of) the controls the gardeners put in place.
He equally ignores the fact that the vast majority of users of open technologies never did, or ever would have, engaged in any truly generative behavior. And there's nothing wrong with that. What was a problem was that the price of keeping things open was often inhibiting the normal, consumptive uses of that larger group.
What we have now is by no means the perfect system but it's considerably more balanced than it was before, and there's no evidence whatsoever of the epic collapse of innovation Zittrain has been forecasting for years.
No relation to Happy Monkey
Don't worry. Eventually it will be "Don't buy it, and do without modern technology."
..that I lived in the golden age of computer freedom, and future generations will only read about it in history books.
Walled gardens, virtual machines, signed code, app stores etc may be useful, but little by little, are removing our freedom to actually control the machine.
I fear that in the future, you will need a license to write code under constant government scrutiny. Kinda like making explosives.
But then, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon...
Your envy clouds your judgement. It's not a walled garden and the PC is dead. It's that the driver of PC growth today is the Mac with OS X whose child, iOS is owning the next generation of personal consumption. Building the cheapest disposable PC and/or Workstation only favors Microsoft whose OEM license is paid whether HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc., sell $1000, $2000, $3,000, $4K+ systems.
No one but Apple controls the entire end-to-end solution. Not Microsoft, not anyone else. OS X sales continues to steadily expand and iOS steadily expands times ten. When Microsoft starts to dip down to 80% of the Desktop market it'll be due to Apple's OS X and it's child, iOS. It won't be due to FreeBSD, Linux, or any other UNIX flavored OS using cheap clone hardware.
You want a third big box OS for consumers to desire you'll have to control the end-to-end solution, not just the Server Market.
Nothing is guaranteed and desire to evolve into new paradigms is up to any start-up or large conglomerate to seize. If not, they'll become the next IBM who is completely out of the Consumer space.