Ecosystems Evolve (Premium)

Ecosystems matter, but ecosystems can also be used to lock you into a particular vendor’s products and services. And this is a particularly serious problem with abusive Big Tech companies, so it’s wise to enter into these things with open eyes. And an exit strategy.

I originally intended to write a single article on this topic, but it’s grown into a beast of sorts, and so I’ve decided to break it up into separate posts. Here, I look at how ecosystems evolve. And future posts will focus on individual ecosystems, and how I have, or have not adopted them.

Let’s go back in time a bit.

When Apple launched the iTunes Store, one of the core components of this platform was the FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies that protected purchased songs from being stolen, helping the record companies make the shift to digital music. This DRM also helped Apple, of course, because customers were unlikely to jump ship to rival music platforms if they’d have to rebuy their music.

But DRM is no longer a concern with legally purchased music these days, and you can now freely use any music you’ve purchased from Apple or other sources anywhere you wish. Some would likely credit this freedom to the rise in music streaming services, but that’s not really the case: Apple dropped DRM from iTunes music in 2009. But whatever the reason, this is an interesting example of how a single change can have a major impact on those who have adopted a particular ecosystem: this is one less way in which Apple, in this case, can lock in customers.

The shift away from DRM in digital music naturally led to questions about whether other major content types---eBooks, audiobooks, and digital video---might one day follow suit. That hasn’t happened yet, but we do have a much more recent example of a similar shift: thanks to the rise of the Matter smart home standard, customers will no longer have to hunt and peck for devices that are compatible with the smart home infrastructure they’ve adopted.

Matter began life as something called Connected Home over IP, or CHIP, about three years ago, and the reason it, ahem, mattered from the very beginning is that all of the major players in this industry---Amazon, Apple, and Google---were onboard from the start. Interestingly, the nuts of bolts of Matter appear to have started largely with Google, which otherwise seems to have almost checked out with its smart home initiatives in recent years: the underlying protocol began as Google Weave, and Matter’s IoT mesh capabilities began as Google Thread. But for the advantages promised by this standard, the biggest to me, is interoperability, that ability to seamlessly switch ecosystems.

As a Microsoft follower, it’s hard not to wonder how different the world might be had Matter arrived in time to save Cortana. But today, it ensures that all compatible devices will work with whatever smart home infrastructure you choose now or in the future, wheth...