The Importance of Portability (Premium)

Last week’s unexpected Groove news has triggered some latent feelings of remorse indignation from Microsoft’s world-weary fans. I feel it too, even though I long ago resigned myself to the fact that Microsoft will never truly be serious about—or matter to—consumers. But we can collectively try and avoid these kinds of dead-ends and bad decisions going forward. And the key is to doing so is to embrace portability wherever and whenever possible.

That word—portability—may scare some people, especially those who came of age in the warm, comfortable embrace of Microsoft and the “us vs. them” mentality that predated the current Satya Nadella era. But in the sense that “open will always win in the end,” yet another one of those catch-phrases that I’ve latched onto, portability will always win in the end, too. It’s the right path forward.

So what do I mean by portability?

When you buy something digital—a service, media content, or even an application—you should try to ensure that the purchase is as broadly compatible across platforms as is possible. And that that compatibility includes any changes you might make in the future.

In the good old days, so to speak, just staying within the Windows (or the Microsoft) ecosystem provided its own kind of portability. We knew that the applications and games we bought on one PC would work on the next, and across different versions of Windows. The content we purchased, rented, or subscribed to would as well.

But then things changed, and not just for Microsoft. Today, we have multiple platforms to contend with, in mobile, in the living room, on our desktops, and even on our wrists and in the walls of our homes. This new digital economy is often described as disruptive, and that’s a perfect word. It is disruptive. Both to the established players that are suddenly failing and to us, the users who have to contend with this mess.

But it’s getting better. And it’s lot better today than it was when Steve Jobs and Apple first decided to enter the digital music market with the iPod and iTunes. Almost 20 years ago now, they made a decisive strike against portability: Apple’s systems were closed and proprietary, and were protected by digital controls. Over time, however, something interesting happened: As the music industry belated embraced digital, the digital protections on purchased music disappeared. Now, any music that you buy from any service will work anywhere. So those who paid Apple for music are able to switch to other services. The music is portable. Open won.

(Don’t worry about Apple: It has since moved on to music subscription services just like the rest of the industry and can continue to charge customers on a more predictable monthly basis.)

I never thought that we’d see this same level of portability with movies, but then Movies Anywhere—a major update to a previously Disney-centric service—appeared. Movies Anywhere isn’t 100 percent compatible across all movie studios, but it does provide cross-platform access to movies from Disney, Sony, Twentieth-Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. That’s the top five in the industry.

What this means, practically speaking, is that you can buy a movie from a participating movie studio from, say, Apple. And then fire up your Android phone and watch it in Google Movies & TV. Or vice versa. Content that’s Movie Anywhere-compatible is available all over the place, on smartphones, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, and more.

Subscription services of all kinds are likewise very portable: Spotify is available anywhere you want it, and even Apple Music has been ported to Android. Audible and Kindle are where they need to be, on all mobile devices. Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and whatever else is pretty much available anywhere. The age of services being stuck on a single platform—like Zune and iTunes—is long gone.

Perhaps most amazingly, we are just now entering a new era of app portability, too. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) allow you to run the same apps virtually anywhere; on smartphones and tablets to PCs and Macs and Chromebooks, of course, but also on any device that supports a web browser. And even lesser-known (to consumers) efforts like Flutter or Xamarin make it possible for developers to target multiple hardware platforms and create truly native applications from a single code base. The era of Windows-only applications is drawing to a close. And good riddance.

(Even Microsoft’s Office 365 is pretty portable. The service provides desktop applications for both Windows and Mac, which one might argue makes that transition easier for switchers. And the web and mobile apps work everywhere.)

If you’ve read any of the articles I’ve written over the past year about my decisions on cord-cutting, music services, or similar, you may have noticed that this notion of portability is pervasive throughout: Making sure that everything works everywhere it should is a key part of the decision-making process. Portability matters.

There are still gaps, obviously. And that act of getting from here to there—yes, another classic Thurrottism, sorry—can be messy and marked with mistakes. It’s OK. All we can do is try, be open to change, and to make the best possible decisions for ourselves.

I recall a conversation I had years ago with a friend, formerly from Microsoft, discussing the reasons he could never move from the iPhone to Android. The single-biggest issue at the time, he claimed, was that he had spent over $1000 on apps and media content and he didn’t want to lose that in the switch, or have to pay for it all over again.

That rationale struck me as over-simplistic at the time. First of all, the guy was and still is quite affluent, and could easily afford the cost of switching. And besides, he wouldn’t need everything he had previously purchased; surely some of those purchases were duds.

Whatever: Today, that argument falls flat on its face. Switching between an iPhone and an Android handset, or between Apple TV and Roku, or between Windows and Mac, or whatever, is far less difficult than ever before. Is arguably not difficult at all. Yes, there is still some cost. But it’s nothing like it was even 5 years ago.

And that’s what portability gives us. Many improved opportunities to make the right choices for ourselves.