[jonnathanson]

The relative ubiquity of the internet is an important consideration here. In previous swings of the pendulum, computing (and/or the internet) was concentrated among a much smaller base of users, many of whom had strongly vested interests in the side to which the pendulum was swinging.

These days, the internet is certainly ubiquitous, and "smart" mobile devices are basically ubiquitous, if not yet entirely so. And the vast majority of today's users don't seem to care about privacy, open vs. closed ecosystems, etc. The sheer volume of users who either don't know, or don't care, about these things shifts a LOT of power into the hands of the current power players in the status quo. Hackers and power users are still major forces for change, and always will be. And, in time, they may prevail by offering better solutions to the masses. But the weight of the masses is heavier than it ever has been.

I submit that the fulcrum on which the hackers will tilt the masses isn't security, privacy, or anything of that nature. It's openness, and by proxy, IP management. It's the free transmission (or lack thereof) of ideas, information, and content. It's the interoperability (or lack thereof) of all of these things between devices and systems, outside the restrictions or central control of one or two major parties.

But the force currently arrayed against the growth of openness is a powerful one. It's convenience. And convenience is, arguably, THE most powerful driver in human psychology. Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, telecoms, and other players in the content space are making plays to become total-solution providers. And the appeal of a one-stop, total solution (the Walmart Effect, if you will) is quite powerful to the masses. To overcome this appeal, the next great disruption will need to equate openness with convenience. Open must = easy. More precisely, open must be more highly correlated with ease than walled gardens are correlated with ease.

An historical side note:

AOL's monopoly in the ISP game, which lasted for so many years, came about because AOL offered the easiest, most idiot-proof, and most convenient internet experience. It was a walled garden, but beyond the wall, the typical user just saw a massive, untamed jungle full of complex systems, wonky communities, and seemingly insurmountable technical difficulties. AOL fell when people figured out how to make the world outside the wall more ordered, more appealing, and more uniformly approachable. Open standards had a lot to do with this. So did the appearance of portals, which represented a less daunting half-step between the Great Untamed Wild and the AOL garden. And search engines continued this evolution, making the point of entry into most users' internet experience very centralized, orderly, and convenient without walling everything up. Search engines created the subconscious appearance of a walled garden without actually erecting walls.

[iamwil]

"To overcome this appeal, the next great disruption will need to equate openness with convenience. Open must = easy. More precisely, open must be more highly correlated with ease than walled gardens are correlated with ease."

I agree with this, but I'm not sure how it'd happen.

Open source has been really good for things that are infrastructure, or common building blocks. However, it's not been so good for things at the top of the stack, like applications. Design by committee is no design at all.

If Apple's done anything right, it's brought design to the forefront of a lot of people's thought as a driving force for innovation (and to a lesser extent, Ruby, with its focus on programmer happiness, which is language design)

But even then, most open source software focuses on getting it to work first, and figures that someone else will come along to help later. The most usable projects are the ones that decide from the beginning to focus on usability.

In addition, some people probably feel, "Hey, I'm giving this away for free already, and you're complaining about usability? You go fix it."

And are there open source designs? Twitter bootstrap is the only one I'm aware of. Dribbble is the closest, but there, they're not sharing design, in the sense of "hey you can use this too", but in the sense of "I'll show off to 'inspire' you"

[jonnathanson]

I agree, but I think it can be done. The early "outside AOL" internet was less well designed, more haphazard, etc. What eventually pulled people out of AOL and into the metaphorical wild was all the riches that could be found there, and found easily and painlessly (getting to that latter step was the key). Both literally, from a business-opportunity standpoint, and figuratively, from a consumer-enjoyment standpoint. There was more to gain outside the walls of the AOL garden, and so people were (eventually) willing to step outside the comfortable, reasonably well-designed walls and explore it. And they started exploring it when it became easy to find and easy to access.

Apple has done a phenomenal job creating a design-forward, UX-optimized, sparklingly walled garden. But I believe that a richness of content, easily accessed and easily used, can lure people outside.

Two things need to happen: 1) more entrepreneurs need to be convinced that the big rewards are outside the walls, and 2) the things they create will need to lure people out there. We may need a third factor, like the one Yahoo and eventually Google performed for the nascent WWW, which was to add the easy-access layer on top of it all.

Full disclosure: I used to work at Apple, I greatly admire them, and I bear no ill will toward them at all. But I am a big proponent of the open internet, and I believe that the arc of history will bend back toward it eventually.