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Looking back to look forward

robin.jewsbury | 03 January, 2008 14:07

I've been inspired to write this blog by an article by Tim O'Reilly in the New York Times recently.

Basically he was likening the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 and the openness in software development it spawned to today's open movements in Mobile. 

Let's take his ideas a few steps further by comparing the past computer industry with today's Mobile Internet.  So IBM creating an open computer design could be likened to Google creating an open handset design - but remember that IBM never really profitted from this approach - it was Microsoft who profitted.  So in this analogy who is it that can profit from an open design - hopefully its the software developers that read this blog :-).

Strangely I think you can also see an analogy between Apple in the 80's with the Lisa and Mac, not being open but producing some exiciting designs with today's Apple and the iPhone.  However, Apple's concentration on keeping control was their eventual downfall and caused of the company being in the doldrums during the 90s.

Meanwhile I think you could also equate Nokia with the Unix manufacturer's of the 80s (Xenix and Sun).  Unix was always developer friendly just like the S60 platform and Sun branched out from hardware in a software platform of Java just like Nokia is branching out into a services platform today.

Now we just need someone to invent the Mobile analogy of what was the growth of the Internet to give us the kind of acceleration for mobile which occurred for computing in the 90s.   What could that be?  Let's hope it starts in 2008.

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