Remember ‘walled gardens‘? It was a popular concept in debating the blossoming of social networks a few years ago. Today Facebook – having surpassed the United States and moving toward China and India in population – is far more open than the walled communities it was once compared to – AOL and CompuServe. But Facebook is still a walled community. On Facebook you play by Facebook’s rules. For the most part we citizens of FB are content. In exchange for giving up some of our freedom we get an easy to use interface and a safe way to explore and experience the fascinating tools of Web 2.0.
With this week’s announcement of the iPad I have been again thinking about walled gardens. Put aside the debates about the device itself. Consider instead the iPad’s contribution to a shift that is taking control of content distribution from publishers, studios and record labels and putting it in the hands of hardware manufacturers.
Unlike the battles over Beta and VHS, SD Cards and Memory Sticks, or HD DVD and Blue Ray, the stakes here are higher because the devices themselves now carry the stores on them. Once you buy a Kindle or iPad, you effectively lock yourself into the content they offer through their convenient, online and embedded stores. Conversely, for content producing industries that are struggling with the digital disruption, popular devices like iPods deliver literally millions of potential customers. So if iTunes says a song will cost $1.29, or Kindle pegs e-books at $9.99, what’s the label or publisher to do? Turn away millions of customers by rejecting the platform?
Companies like Apple and Amazon are vying to position themselves between content sellers and content buyers. They are, in this sense, becoming gatekeepers.
And if you have gates and gatekeepers, then you must also have walls.
Again with the training wheels.
We’ve been here before. Recent history provides some insights that we might use to consider the future of Apple or Amazon controlling the distribution of digital content. AOL and Internet Explorer serve as interesting precursors to the current situation. In both cases, people demonstrated a consistent behavior that seems to be showing up again in consumer behaviors today.
That human behavior is this:
When the Internet was new (to the general public, anyhow), people were apprehensive and unsure. They asked for a safe entry point. Insert American Online. AOL was the Internet with training wheels. While most of us were discovering chat rooms and instant messaging, a minority of web surfing pioneers eschewed AOL and struck out on their own. They came back with stories of wonderful things you couldn’t get on AOL. The more people heard the more curious and discontented they became. Eventually, as all citizens of walled communities do, they started to think beyond the walls.
No sooner had the newly liberated masses escaped AOL for the wide open Internet than they began to again feel a little disoriented and apprehensive. The Internet was big and open and wild. While they didn’t want the walls of AOL they admittedly needed some help navigating this digital wilderness. Along comes Internet Explorer, conveniently bundled in your operating system. IE provided people comfort, usability and essentially training wheels via a familiar (enough) user interface and a brand they had known and trusted for some time (Microsoft).
As with AOL, some brave innovators opted not to dine on what Explorer was serving. Again people began to hear that IE rendered the web a certain way. In fact it sometimes ignored web pages completely. As with life in AOL, when those Internet pioneers came back with tales of something better beyond the confines of IE people again demanded the walls come down.
Today Apple, Amazon are providing the same training wheels as we get oriented to digital content delivery. We people are just getting comfortable with digital music and e-books. So, as with web surfing in the late 90’s and web browsing in the early millennium, we’re willing to accept the training wheels again. Shiny, touch-screen training wheels that make the whole experience easier.
“But today we can still go out on the Internet, using our browser, and pull down any content we want,” you might be thinking. That is true. But if you want to play content on the sexy news devices – the same innovative devices that deliver instant access to your online community, the convenience of portability, and of course the social cache that you’re cool – you have to choose the content those device manufacturers are selling.
Just as it happened for ISPs and then Web browsers so I am guessing it will happen with mobile social-media devices. It’s easy to get swept up in the talk of paradigm shift, but these empires built by AOL, Netscape, Microsoft, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are in truth transient. Sometimes they live decades. Sometimes just years. No doubt some pioneers are out there right now, toiling away in anonymity, hacking at the walls being built, sneaking content onto iPhone and iPads and Kindles. Some day they will return with wonderful stories of all the great things to be enjoyed were we all not tethered to iTunes or the Kindle store. At that time people will begin to chip away at the very walls being built right now.
The Internet is famous for the phrase ‘Information wants to be free.’ This ‘openness’ is an inherent conflict with the commercialization of the Internet. In some sense, it is a necessity. It keeps people wanting more which forces businesses to continually innovate.
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