Michael Robertson on importance of open formats
CNet has an interesting interview with Michael Robertson, the man behind the original version of MP3.com, Linspire Linux, and now MP3tunes.com.
Most of the interview involves Robertson’s many battles with the music industry, and persistence with the mp3 format in spite of naysayers—well worth reading, but not particularly applicable to e-books.
However, this part strikes a chord with what TeleRead has been saying about the importance of open formats. Robertson had been discussing how, in 1997, Real had 85% of the market and was thought to be the wave of the future.
Q: How did Real blow it?
Where Real missed out is this counterintuitive notion where you have to give up control to get control. What I mean by that is, with MP3 anybody could write any software program you wanted to. You could go design hardware and create Web sites. You didn’t have to drive up to Seattle and ask for Real’s permission. So the notion of having open technology free to everybody that wasn’t tightly and centrally controlled by a corporation is counterintuitive. Real was building servers and a player and standing on proprietary technology and what happened was that the rest of the world out-developed and out-innovated Real. This is what I saw with MP3. Hey, this open format allows anyone to build to it. The other guys said, “All roads have to lead back to me.”Q: That’s the Sony way.
Yeah the Sony way, and you see what happens. If you’re lucky and you get the mojo going, you get the Walkman, but if you’re not then you fade into irrelevancy. Apple is the one big exception with their iTunes empire, but mark my words they will go down and the rest of the world will catch them and surpass them. We’ve seen this before. We’ve seen this with the original Mac, which was a superior personal computing platform. Nobody can dispute that, but it didn’t win. Microsoft Windows won because Bill Gates is a genius? No, because they had all the developers.
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