{"id":3096,"date":"2017-01-23T14:49:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T19:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=3096"},"modified":"2017-01-23T14:49:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T19:49:01","slug":"modularity-is-great-if-you-commoditize-the-right-complements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=3096","title":{"rendered":"modularity is great – if you commoditize the right complements"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google bought Android<\/a> and made great things with it.<\/p>\n

They also had an interesting audacity to announce an “open, modular” phone that ‘anyone’ could design from, and make components that would play nicely together (like IBM<\/a> did with their initial ISA architecture releases back in the 80s). (Microsoft then flipped the tables on IBM and non-exclusively licensed MS-DOS to them, which meant hardware manufacturers could build\u00a0entire<\/em> replacement “[IBM] PC compatible” machines … that ran Microsoft software. )<\/p>\n

But this only works if you’re Google – an advertising company that wants more eyeballs on its ads.<\/p>\n

If you’re a phone manufacturer, like {{Motorola}}, the absolute\u00a0last<\/em><\/strong> thing you want is for “anyone” to be able to replace all of the modules in your phone – because you’re\u00a0not<\/em> selling the OS, you’re selling hardware. As Joel Spolsky wrote 15 years ago,<\/p>\n

If you can run your software anywhere, that makes hardware more of a commodity. As hardware prices go down, the market expands, driving more demand for software (and leaving customers with extra money to spend on software which can now be more expensive.)<\/p>\n

Sun\u2019s enthusiasm for WORA is, um, strange<\/em>, because Sun is a hardware company. Making hardware a commodity is the last<\/em> thing they want to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Motorola is a\u00a0hardware<\/em> company. They may want\u00a0add-ons<\/em> to be available to their base phone, but the certainly don’t want you replacing\u00a0everything<\/em> – unless it’s from\u00a0them.<\/em><\/p>\n

{{Jean-Louis Gass\u00e9e}} notes<\/a> these issues in his<\/a> latest article<\/a>, “Lazy Thinking: Modularity Always Works”,<\/p>\n

In order to succeed, \u201cdisruptive modularity\u201d needs a stable architecture with well-defined and documented boundaries. Module innovators need to be able to slide their creations into place without playing havoc with the rest of the edifice. This is how it worked in the Wintel PC world\u2026sort of. In PC reality, as many of us have experienced, the sliding in and out of modules wasn\u2019t so neat and often landed us in Device Driver purgatory. In the mid-nineties, one Microsoft director told me that the Redmond company actually spent more engineering resources on drivers than on Windows\u2019 core software. …
\nMost important, strongly-worded theories are less interesting than exploring their cracks, where they don\u2019t seem to work. This is how physics keeps moving forward and this is also how our understanding of business should advance. In the case of Project Ara, the unexamined consensual acceptance of Disruption Theory led many to believe that Modularity Always Wins meant smartphones would (and should) follow the same path as PCs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I hope JLG (and I, and Joel Spolsky, and basic economics) are wrong.<\/p>\n

But I doubt it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google bought Android and made great things with it. They also had an interesting audacity to announce an “open, modular” phone that ‘anyone’ could design from, and make components that would play nicely together (like IBM did with their initial ISA architecture releases back in the 80s). (Microsoft then flipped the tables on IBM and …
Continue reading modularity is great – if you commoditize the right complements<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,20],"tags":[92,262,358,499],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-3096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-huh","tag-android","tag-economics","tag-google","tag-motorola"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3096"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=3096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}