The secret of generative systems is that the most creative ideas for how a new platform can be used don’t necessarily come from the creators of the platform. It was not IBM but Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston (VisiCalc), Mitch Kapor (Lotus 1-2-3), and Bill Gates who developed the “killer applications” that made the IBM personal computer such a success. It was Tim Berners-Lee, not Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (the designers of the Internet’s TCP/IP protocol), who developed the Internet’s own first killer application, the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin, not Tim Berners-Lee, who figured out how to turn the World Wide Web into a tool that revolutionized business.
Such stories suggest how technology advances, as each new generation stands on the shoulders of preceding giants. Fundamental technology breakthroughs are often not exploited by their creators, but by a second generation of entrepreneurs who put it to work.
But advances don’t just come from entrepreneurs playing by the rules of new platforms. Sometimes they come from those who break the rules. MIT professor Eric von Hippel has written extensively about this phenomenon, how “lead users”[31] of a product push it to its limits and beyond, showing vendors where their product wants to go, in much the way that rushing water carves its own path through the earth.
There’s no better contemporary example than Google Maps, introduced in 2005, nearly 10 years after MapQuest, the first Internet site providing maps and directions. Yet today, Google Maps is the dominant mapping platform by most measures. How did this happen?
When Google Maps was introduced, it featured a cool new AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interface that made it easy to dynamically drag and zoom the map. But there was a hidden feature as well, soon discovered by independent developers. Because JavaScript is interpreted code, it was possible to extract the underlying map coordinate data. A programmer named Paul Rademacher introduced the first Google Maps mashup, HousingMaps.com, taking data from another Internet site, Craigslist.org, and creating an application that put Craigslist apartment and home listings onto a Google Map.
What did Google do? Far from shutting down Rademacher’s site and branding him a pirate, Google hired him, and soon put out an API that made it easier for anyone to do what he did. Competitors, who had long had mapping APIs but locked them up behind tightly controlled corporate developer programs, failed to seize the opportunity. Before long there were thousands of Google Maps mashups, and mapping had become an integral part of every web developer’s toolkit.
Today, according to the site ProgrammableWeb.com, which tracks mashups and reuse of web APIs, Google Maps accounts for nearly 90% of all mapping mashups, versus only a few percent each for MapQuest, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, even though these companies had a huge head start in web mapping.
There are potent lessons here for governments opening up access to their data via APIs. Developers may use those APIs in unexpected ways. This is a good thing. If you see signs of uses that you didn’t consider, respond quickly, adapting the APIs to those new uses rather than trying to block them.
In this regard, consider an instructive counterexample to Google Maps from the government sector. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority recently attempted to stop the distribution of an iPhone app called StationStops, which provides schedule information for Metro-North trains. After a legal battle, the MTA relented.[32] Other cities, meanwhile, realized that having independent developers build applications that provide information to citizens is a benefit both to citizens and to overworked government agencies, not “copyright infringement and intellectual property theft,” as the MTA had originally maintained.
The whole point of government as a platform is to encourage the private sector to build applications that government didn’t consider or doesn’t have the resources to create. Open data is a powerful way to enable the private sector to do just that.
Open data is important not just because it is a key enabler of outside innovation. It’s also important to place in the context of current Internet business models. To explain, we require a brief excursion.
One of the central platform lessons of the PC era is summed up in a principle that Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen called “the law of conservation of attractive profits”:[33]
When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.
As the IBM PC—built from commodity off-the-shelf parts—became dominant, hardware margins declined, over time becoming razor thin. But according to Christensen’s law, something else became valuable, namely software, and Microsoft was soon earning the outsized profits that once were claimed by IBM. But even in an ecosystem of standard off-the-shelf parts, it is sometimes possible to corner a market, and that’s just what Intel did when it broke with IBM’s policy that every component had to be available from at least two suppliers, and refused to license its 80386 design to other chip manufacturers. That was the origin of the other half of the famous “Wintel” duopoly of Microsoft and Intel. If you can become the sole source of an essential commodity that is key to an otherwise commoditized product, you too can aspire to a logo like the ubiquitous “Intel Inside.”
Reflecting on the role of open source software and open protocols and standards in commoditizing the software of the Internet, I concluded in my 2003 paper “The Open Source Paradigm Shift”[34] that something similar would happen on the Internet. Exactly what that was didn’t become clear to me till 2005, when I wrote “What Is Web 2.0?”[35]
If there’s one lesson that is central to the success of Web 2.0, it’s that data and the algorithms that produce value from it—not the software APIs and applications that were the key to the PC era—are the key to marketplace advantage in today’s Internet. Virtually all of the greatest Internet success stories, from eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon through Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are data-driven companies.
In particular, they are companies whose databases have a special characteristic: they get better the more people use them, making it difficult for competitors to enter the market. Once eBay or Craigslist had a critical mass of buyers and sellers, it became far more difficult for competitors to enter the market. Once Google established a virtuous circle of network effects among its AdWords advertisers, it was hard for others to achieve similar results.
The Internet business ecosystem can thus be seen as a competition to establish monopolies over various classes of data. It is indeed data that is the “Intel Inside” of the Internet.
What does this have to do with Government 2.0? If data is indeed the coin of the realm of Internet business models, it stands to reason that companies will find advantage in taking data created at public expense, and working to take control of that data for private gain.
Consider the story of Routesy, an application providing iPhone users with bus arrival data in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like StationStops in New York, it was taken down from the iPhone App Store after a legal complaint. While Muni (the San Francisco transit authority) was supportive of Routesy and believed that its data was public, the contract that Muni had signed with technology provider NextBus allowed NextBus to claim copyright in the data.[36] If you want to have the kind of responsiveness that Google showed in supporting HousingMaps.com and launching the Google Maps mashup ecosystem, you have to make sure that public data remains public!
Fortunately, the NextBus/Routesy dispute was resolved, like MTA/StationStops, with a win for the public sector. The San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority has now released an XML API to the NextBus data.[37]
[32] “M.T.A. Is Easing Its Strict, Sometimes Combative, Approach to Outside Web Developers,” New York Times, September 27, 2009.
[33] The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, Harvard Business Press, 2003.