IPUrbia

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: too many tech startups spend way too much time ridiculing the big guys and too little time actually keeping a close eye on the competition and, well, competing.

AT&T is rolling out voice over IP as part of its U-Verse offering. This isn’t all that interesting: after all, residential voice service, regardless as to how digitized, packetized, or processized it gets, is still, well, residential voice service and is pretty boring stuff.

Still, what is interesting is that we are increasingly seeing signs of where AT&T (and presumably the other big service providers) are heading: integration. So, AT&T U-Verse customers will now see caller ID on their TV screens; push video from their cell phones to their television, and so forth. More and more, AT&T is leveraging their multiple platforms to offer features beyond just “single bill”. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing revolutionary; however, it creates competitive features that are hard to match because doing so requires access, if not ownership, of multiple pipes (voice, video, data, and mobile).

Increasingly, it’s beginning to get harder for the basement operations to match the offering of the big guys. 10 years ago, any redneck with a T1, PRI and a Portmaster could offer dialup service that was more or less comparable with that of the Baby Bells. Today, the barriers to entry are higher. The same thing will happen in the application space…remember the evolution of the PC software industry? The gaming industry? Browse the list of applications that Google and Yahoo offer these days? In the end, the ability to bring innovative ideas to market and surpass the status-quo requires, to some degree, the ability to match the offering of the status-quo along with the innovative improvements.

To put the problem more succinctly, the time is fast arriving where it is no longer possible to bootstrap small startups creating an end-to-end solution.

The answer, of course, is simple: leverage open tools and frameworks, open APIs, create business deals and so forth. In other words, don’t create massive end-to-end solutions from scratch.

Open tools, frameworks, and standards have been driving much of Web 1.0 and 2.0. They drove the startup cost down to next to nothing and allowed for startups to quickly have access to countless years of platform and software development via a quick download.

However, it bothers me that such an approach may also disappear. Not that open source and open standards are struggling–nay, they are in use everywhere. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) and its various variations is a buzzword of Web 2.0; the open networking protocols underlying the Internet make it possible to use commodity, generic PCs outfitted with a couple of pieces of software to access virtually all the content on the Internet, Asterisk and OpenSER have been behind dozens of VoIP startups, etc., etc., etc…

And the applications? Well…the truth is that most of the web 2.0 developers out there take open standards and open source and develop these nice neat applications that are 20x more closed and incompatible than anything Microsoft dreamed of. Damn them. Damn them all.

At least with Windows, there was an API and a common filesystem to allow interoperability between applications.

Will open source die from neglect or from unacknowledged, unreciprocated abuse?

The time is coming when many of these web 2.0 startups are going to realize, at best, that they are making widgets. Nice widgets with pretty AJAXY interfaces, to be sure, that do very neat functions that no one ever had quite thought was needed (or, in most cases, ever will think is needed), but widgets nevertheless.

Once the novelty wears off (and believe me, it is wearing off quicker and quicker these days), the usefulness of a widget is how neatly it fits into the rest of our widgets. Closed and alone, it will perish a quiet, quick meaningless death, to become part of the web 2.0 bust jokes during the web 3.0 bubble. Open and integrated, it will become part of exciting and innovative solutions that compete head-on and win against the big guys.

Develop and publish APIs for software. Open source the platform. Develop open, because your business depends on a vibrant community that lives and breathes open standards, even (especially!) in its applications.