Shaneland

Over the last couple of months quite a lot of my energy has been devoted to the topic of technology certification.  This might not appear to be the most interesting thing in the world (and it’s not) but I believe it’s going to be an increasingly important issue.

Certification is generally about providing a certain guarantee that a product or service meets certain standards.  We have had certification for things like build quality for years.  Virtually everyone is familiar with ISO and British Standards (BS).

There is a new wave of certification on the way for an abstract concept called ‘openness’.  This applies mainly to the technology marketplace but might have ramifications for a vast number of things.  The idea is to prevent ‘lock-in’, to allow ‘interoperability’ and to facilitate ’substitutability’.

Hey, don’t glaze over.  These are important concepts.

Lock-in is when you buy something and you’re stuck with it.  If you’ve ever experimented with new technology you’ll know this feeling.  You buy the flashy new video recorder and one year later find that you’re the only person with a Betamax unit, everyone else got VHS systems, and no one sells Betamax tapes any more.

Interoperability is when things work with each other.  You know, when one computer talks to another.  When your mobile phone wanders from England to Germany and still works.  When your MP3 players works on your Windows computer as well as your best friend’s Apple Mac.

Substitutability is when things can be replaced.  It’s kinda like lock-in.  It is a measure of how easy it is to substitute something for another product or solution that provides roughly the same service.  You know, when you get bored of your white MP3 player and want to buy a nifty green one from another manufacturer.  That’s substitution.  You’d be surprised how difficult it can be to find substitutable technology.

So, for years technology has been stacked in favour of manufacturers.  There has been lots of lock-in, limited interoperability and usually no substitutability. The poor paying customer has continually found themselves really stuck.  This is about to change.

Over the coming year at least one certification framework will be introduced to empower customers when it comes to technology.  People will see that products are judged according to their level of ‘openness’ and therefore people will be able to make more informed choices when it comes to purchase decisions.

I think that’s going to be very cool.  What might be surprising is that some multinational technology companies also think it’s pretty cool, and are embracing the idea of open certification frameworks.  Perhaps they have found the cost of endless patents and unique technology support quite crippling, especially when upstart companies from developing nations simply don’t bother with it.

All of this certification has big ramifications for developing nations.  Openness is far bigger than something that sounds cool; it provides a direct avenue for the positive empowerment of consumers and future technology developers.  It’s about re-conceptualising how we bring hardware and software to the market.  It used to be that obscurity and hidden features provided an aspect of competitive advantage.  In the future the inverse will be true.  The very openness of solutions will provide a critical differentiator in a saturated market.

I bought an iPod shuffle.  Thirteen months later the stupid thing died.  Apple said they don’t fix them and informed me that I’d have to buy another.  I didn’t want to.  But there was a problem.  All of my music was in the darned Apple AAC format, and all of the music I had purchased from the iTunes store would only play on the iPod.  I was locked into owning iPods.

When open certification takes hold issues like this will be come the exception rather than the norm.  That’ll be good.  I mean, I think I’d like to buy one of those nice purple Sony MP3 players.  I’d like to have that option.  It would make me feel that I control my wallet rather than Apple’s shareholders.

How does all this fit into the relationship between Europe, China and technology?  Well, think about how distorted the market is right now because of closed design, undocumented interfaces, patents and other activities designed to stifle competition rather than promote it.  It’s really hard for companies in a developing nation to produce interoperable or substitutable technology when the companies in developed nations don’t want to play fair.

When openness is embraced a critical component of the future technology market it will facilitate innovation, and this innovation will in turn facilitate better technology getting to consumers.  Things will have to actually be better to win market share.

In other words, openness will help give businesses in the East a real chance at making their mark on the world market if their products are good enough.  It’ll help level the playing field and it’ll help ensure that the bright new generation currently at universities around the world will have the opportunity to shape global communication rather than just spit out upgrades and rip-offs of existing technology.

It’ll be pretty interesting.  For technologists like myself it’ll be one of those ‘hold onto your hats’ moments of innovation.  I’m looking forward to it.

This article was originally published on Dimsum. Copyright (c) 2006 Shane Coughlan.