Locked out of the walled gardens

A dark side of the walled gardens of technology is becoming visible.

The old paradigm was one of home ownership. You purchased your equipment (a PC) and then you installed whatever software you wanted. You decided. There were constraints, of course. PCs typically ran Windows (or before that, DOS) and the software had to run under the operating system. PCs had various configurations and the software had to fit (a floppy-only PC could not run large software that required a hard drive, for example).

Once installed, you had to see to the care and feeding of the software. You had to ensure that updates were applied. You had to ensure that data you exchanged with other users was compatible with their systems.

The benefit of this paradigm is the open market and the freedoms that come with it. Vendors are free to enter the market and offer their wares. You are free to choose among those products. You could pick from a number of word processors, spreadsheets, databases, compilers and IDEs, project managers, and other product categories.

The walled gardens of iOS and Android (and soon Windows and MacOS X) provide a different paradigm. If the old paradigm was one of home ownership, the new paradigm is one of renting an apartment. You still have a place for your stuff, yet a lot of the tedious chores of ownership have been removed.

With Apple's walled garden of iOS (and the gatekeeper iTunes), updates are automatic, and software is guaranteed to be compatible. The same holds for Google's Android garden and its gatekeeper 'Play Store'. They guard against 'unfriendly' software.

But the price of living inside the walled garden is that one loses the open market. Only selected vendors may enter the market, and those that do may offer a limited selection of products. Apple and Google enforce requirements for products in their walled gardens, through their registration and gatekeepers. Apple forbids a number of products in iOS and limits others. Web browsers, for example, must use Apple's WebKit engine and not install their own; Apple also forbids programming languages or scripting languages.

We're now seeing the Flash technology being pushed out of the walled gardens. Apple has prohibited it from the beginning. Google has deprecated it on YouTube. How long before Microsoft kicks it out of its garden?

The expulsion of Flash may foreshadow other exclusions of technology. Apple could, at any time, remove Microsoft's apps from iTunes. Google could remove Adobe apps from the Play Store. Microsoft could kick out Oracle apps from the (soon to be revived, I think) Microsoft App Store.

The ability to remove apps from the garden is something that the enterprise folks will want to think about. Building a business on a walled garden has the risk of existing at the whim of the gardener.