When Microsoft introduced Microsoft Windows, it didn’t just introduce the platform; it introduced two applications, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, that showed off the ease of use that came with graphical user interfaces. When Apple introduced the iPhone, it didn’t even introduce the platform until its second year. First, it built a device with remarkable new features and a suite of applications that showed off their power.
Despite everything I’ve said about the importance of a platform provider not competing with its developer ecosystem, it’s also a mistake to think that you can build a platform in the abstract. A great platform provider does things that are ahead of the curve and that take time for the market to catch up to. It’s essential to prime the pump by showing what can be done.
This is why, for example, Apps.DC.gov, the “App Store” for the city of Washington, D.C., provides a better Gov 2.0 platform model than the federal equivalent Data.gov (see Figure 2-3). Although Apps.gov provides a huge service in opening up and promoting APIs to all the data resources of the federal government, it’s hard to know what’s important, because there are no compelling “applications” that show how that data can be put to use. By contrast, Apps.DC.gov features a real app store, with applications written by the city of Washington, D.C.’s own technology team (or funded by them) demonstrating how to use key features. D.C. then took the further step of highlighting, at a top level, third-party apps created by independent developers. This is a model for every government app store to follow.
It is true that the sheer size and scope of the federal data sets, as well as the remoteness of many of them from the everyday lives of citizens, makes for a bigger challenge. But that’s precisely why the federal Gov 2.0 initiative needs to do deep thinking about what federal data resources and APIs will make the most difference to citizens, and invest strategically in applications that will show what can be done.
But the idea of leading by example is far bigger than just Data.gov. Once again, consider health care.
If the current model of “health care reform” were an operating system, it would be Windows Vista, touted as a major revisioning of the system, but in the end, a set of patches that preserve what went before without bringing anything radically new to the table.
If the government wants buy-in for government-run health care, we need the equivalent of an iPhone for the system, something that re-envisions the market so thoroughly that every existing player needs to copy it. I’ve suggested that an opportunity exists to reinvent Medicare so that it is more efficient than any private insurance company, and to make the VA better than any private hospital system. But being realistic, technology teaches us that it’s always harder to refactor an existing system or application than it is to start fresh.
That’s why the “public option” proposed in some current health care bills is such an opportunity. Can we create a new health insurance program that uses the lessons of technology—open standards, simplicity in design, customer self-service, measurement of outcomes, and real-time response to what is learned, not to mention access via new consumer devices—to improve service and reduce costs so radically that the entire market follows?
This is the true measure of Gov 2.0: does it make incremental changes to the existing system, or does it constitute a revolution? Considering the examples of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and other giants of the technology world, it’s clear that they succeeded by changing all the rules, not by playing within the existing system. The personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the iPhone have each managed to simultaneously bring down costs while increasing consumer choice—each by orders of magnitude.
They did this by demonstrating how a radically new approach to existing solutions and business models was, quite simply, orders of magnitude better than what went before.
If government is a platform, and Gov 2.0 is the next release, let’s make it one that shakes up—and reshapes—the world.