A few weeks ago, Anssi Vanjoki, who is the outgoing head of Nokia’s smartphone division, offered this gem: He stated that using the open source Android operating system as the basis for a smartphone is like Finnish boys who “pee in their pants” to keep warm in the winter. It affords temporary relief, but leaves you in a worse position in the end. I have been thinking about this approach and am convinced it is not the right question.
First as a metaphor, it is totally broken. A brief aside into the second law of thermodynamics and neuroscience: When you urinate in your pants, you do not warm yourself; you only move the heat from inside your body to the outside. It only feels warm because your heat-sensing nerves are on your skin, not inside your body.
The substantive issue is whether one can make a commercially viable product and sustain competitive advantages using open source software which is freely available to all comers. The good news about using open source is that one can develop an operating system, without the time and the cost of developing our own from scratch. The bad news is so can your competitors. The worse news is since the software is available for free, your customers might not pay for it.
My rig, when I used to dive doubles.
When I was at CITI, I developed a set of materials on managing intellectual property assets, including open source software. I always started the open source section with the question, “would someone pay for something that is free?” “No,” was the standard response. “Maybe I ain’t too bright, but every weekend in summer, I buy water and air. The two most abundant substances on the planet, and I am paying for them.” On weekends, I would go to the dive shop and get my SCUBA tanks filled with air. Then, I would get a few bottles of water to take on the dive boat. I was not really paying for the air, but the filtration, dehumidification, pressurization, and occasionally some hospital-grade oxygen to make EANx for extended bottom time. The take away is that people will pay for things that are normally free, if those things have been improved in some way which holds value for them.
Insight: Mr. Vanjoki cannot wish Android away. It is out there and he will never get that genie back in the bottleneck. Going forward, the question is whether he can make a better product using the open source software, rather than a proprietary OS. One could spend a billion dollars to develop an OS and there is no guarantee that it will be better. An existing OS is a sunk cost, so if building on it will not produce better product it can just be abandoned. Further, Android code carries an Apache license, so some extensions to the code may be proprietary. So, it is not totally share-alike. In the final analysis, the question is not about peeing to stay warm but whether you can maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive market place – this is independent of your individual choices. Open source software will continue to make the marketplace increasingly competitive, whether one chooses to use it or not.
