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Mike McCue

- There need to be mechanisms to prevent the bad actors from screwing things up, to reward the good actors, and to educate the indifferent so they appreciate their new found openness.

- Most people outside the tech industry don’t understand open and aren’t motivated to switch to something just because it’s open.

- If open looks and feels the same as closed, closed will win.

- If open is more confusing than closed, closed will win.

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3 comments
Brendan Jones

@mike “If open looks and feels the same as closed, closed will win.”

Not sure I fully agree with this one. Definitely agree with all the others, but if the general look and feel of an open system looks like the closed one, the design and UX of it is probably quite good … as long as it’s not exactly like the closed system, because the closed system might have some dark patterns in there that work to lock in and retain users.

What are your thoughts here?

Brendan Jones

@mike Are you saying that if the two products are the same, then the closed system has business resources and other advantages that give them the competitive edge over the open system? Because that I generally agree with, but I’m not sure it’s always a cut and dry case.

Mike McCue

@Brendanjones You make a good point that familiarity is helpful. i.e. I don't have to relearn something from scratch. The point I was getting at is that it's not enough for the open experience to be the same... it has to be fundamentally better to motivate people to switch.

This happened with AOL vs. the web. When really cool web sites emerged that were far better than anything AOL could do on their own, people switched. If the web was just a carbon copy of AOL, nobody would have switched.

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