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 stu...