Vuk Trifkovic
Authored Comments
This is a great topic, I really believe the Apple exception needs more thought.
Having said that, I fundamentally disagree with Roush's entire post and the quote in particular. How exactly is Apple technology "conducive to open innovation"? I really don't know what is "open innovation" he refers to.
As per Apple App Store, that's a walled garden if there ever was one. I really would not consider it open.
Nevertheless, this is an important topic indeed. I think that Greg is spot on - the superior user experience which draws people in is easier to build in a close, centralised manner. Or rather, given the relative immaturity of the open platforms (such as Android), we are about to find out whether closed innovation is only the faster but not the exclusive path to that coveted "state of awesomeness".
It will also be a test of the open platforms. So far, there has been precious little attention to user experience design in the open source to appeal to the mass market. I am somewhat encouraged by noticing few enterprise technology open source projects that are taking this element into consideration. But as Greg has pointed out, the game is on…
First off, thanks for trying to tease open source and crowdsourcing concepts apart. Far too many just lump it together in this big mass of vaguely open and collaborative ways of doing things.
I also think it's pretty important to put these on a continuum. We can argue whether the categories can be defined differently, but it's good to understand that there's variation in these models.
Finally, I'm just wondering whether there is any mileage in describing crowdsourcing as a broader and more efficient market where one side engages in transaction (in 99designs case "Make a design I like the best") sourced from the greater array of the contributors. By contrast, contributing in the open source sphere is typically contribution to a common, shared pool of resources.
This all sounds half-baked to me, but maybe this difference between the market and the common may be a useful category.