The meaning of open

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

by pavs • 17 years ago

45 18 17 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

count• 17 years ago

Using Android as an example of an 'Open' system and giving control to the users is fairly disingenuous. Parts and chunks are 'open', with huge, critical chunks being walled off for Google and OHA member eyes only.

pavs2• 17 years ago

The most interesting part for me:

"So if you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic. Rather it's good business, since an open Internet creates a steady stream of innovations that attracts users and usage and grows the entire industry."

there• 17 years ago

somewhat off-topic: if your weblog hosts content from multiple authors, put the author's name at the top of the post. reading "I" and not knowing who "I" is is confusing and having to scroll to the bottom to find out and then back up again is annoying.

seldo4• 17 years ago

"Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management" is the second line after the title.

pavs2• 17 years ago

No its not. Its actually the last line of the post.

wglb• 17 years ago

I only see it at the end of the entire post . . .

seldo4• 17 years ago

There is much to admire here, and his admittedly grandiose words about the open being the future of government, commerce, entertainment and culture generally sound great to the optimist in all of us. I have a few minor quibbles with conflating their Android efforts with everything else, but in general this is an admirable policy eloquent expressed and stoutly defended.

I think the most important part is this: "All other things being equal, a 10 percent increase in share or a 10 percent increase in industry value should lead to the same outcome. ... As long as we contribute a steady stream of great products we will prosper along with the entire ecosystem. We may get a smaller piece, but it will come from a bigger pie."

I wish more companies had the courage to take this position, but it's so much easier to accept a guaranteed slice of a known pie.

zmimon• 17 years ago

Nice read, but this is a bit shameless:

>In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in.

Convenient, huh? Open just happens to win except for the part that strategically keeping closed makes Google gazillions of dollars. And claiming search is highly competitive? Google has more than 4 x the market share of their nearest competitor.

seldo4• 17 years ago

His claim that opening their algorithm would expose them to gaming of the system is hard to rebut, however. Search spam is bad enough already.

alain94040• 17 years ago

s/search spam/windows viruses/

Would you make the argument that Windows is more secure because its code is not open?

sloppyfocus• 17 years ago

It would be really awesome if google were to open source mapreduce, chubby, and bigtable -- these are tools that would allow innovation at greater scale, and it's not clear that any open tools are of the same quality.

extension• 17 years ago

An application for which you have no source or distributable code and can only use through a dumb terminal while it runs on somebody else's computer is about as far from "open" as you can get.

The meaning of open

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