[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.