Microsoft & its non-existent ecosystem – II

Dave Winer comments on the failure of Plays For Sure:

As closed to developers as Apple is with the iPod and now the iPhone, it’s pretty amazing that Microsoft, a company with a long tradition of offering developer platforms, hasn’t managed to offer a product that’s even worth considering by developers as an alternative to the non-existent option of producing software for Apple’s mobile devices.

Another thing to consider is whether the Zune has completely closed the door for third-party vendors. What firm is going to trust Microsoft enough to invest substantial money to develop a compelling product and hope Microsoft doesn’t use their ideas to crush them with Zune? Zune ensured that the PFS platform is dead. Microsoft lacks the human interface knowhow to compete with Apple. Who will step up? Real & Sansa? On the other hand, maybe independent developers have no choice but to continue to use PFS and slog along until DRM goes away.

Microsoft and its non-existent ecosystem

Steve Ballmer talks to Knowledge@Wharton about PlaysForSure:

Sustaining this level of agility often involves making difficult choices. With the launch of Zune, for example, Microsoft introduced a product that was incompatible with the “PlaysForSure” digital rights management (DRM) scheme the company had been previously encouraging all its partners to use. Following the model that made Microsoft’s Windows so successful, Microsoft licensed PlaysForSure to multiple hardware vendors of digital music players. “We thought that was a brilliant strategy — [develop] an open ecosystem, get a lot of people [to support it].” What happened? As Ballmer puts it, “In this particular case, the whole was not bigger than the sum of the parts.” And, as a result, “Apple — with one model that was simple and consistent — wound up taking 75%-80% of the market.”

That entire platform thing worked because there were a large number of independent software developers who were building applications that consumers needed. Microsoft effectively killed that “ecosystem” by co-opting innovative third-party software as part their own or as part of the OS. That’s why there is a dearth of software vendors building unique and new applications for Windows. There is no ecosystem. Brilliant strategy? Maybe 15 years ago.