Media client monoculture

When a lot of people look back on the computer industry and wonder how it was we got to where we are, where one company dominates so much of the landscape. They can often talk about what happened in the court system in terms of antitrust. But one of the reasons that Microsoft is so popular is because of what they call the ecosystem. You have developers, you have the software they are developing and then you also have the consumers of that software. Now, when developers develop software for a particular platform, consumers will buy that software and then when they buy that software, that encourages developers to keep developing software for that platform and it becomes a vicious circle.

So now let's take out the software from this bubble and let's add multimedia content. We have pretty much the same thing when it comes to audio and video out there. For example, there are competing technologies over platforms. There is QuickTime and there is Windows Media Player and there is Real, and there is Flash. All these different technologies, all different targets that developers can use to go after different audiences with their content. But if you're a developer, then which of these are you going to pick? You are going to pick the one with the biggest target because you want to reach the biggest audience in hopes of selling the most amount of your stuff. Well, the biggest target right now is still the Microsoft world because the Windows that are running on all these different computers and because of Pocket PC running on all these different devices. You have computers. You have Pocket PCs and PDAs with little screens on them. You also have cell phones, flip phones, all running this Microsoft technology and all able to learn Windows Media technology. So if you are a developer, that's really where you are going to go first because you are going to go to this big mass market. Well, if you go to that big mass market, then the vicious circle starts all over again.

Consumers say, "Well, I want the best content," and it happens to be on these platforms, so events of happening is when they buy those platforms, it encourages developers to develop more content for them and then when that happens regardless of what company is involved, which technology, one company ends up dominating. We call that a monoculture and it gets us into the sort of the same situation that we are in today where one company sort of controls everything we do and there is a danger involved in that.

Now these other companies, like Apple and Real and Flash, Macromedia is the company that makes Flash, they are all trying to figure out how to nose their way into this ecosystem. But the people who are really in charge are you, the consumer. You are the people who have to decide how you're going to offset any future monocultures. You have to make choices. You can't let one proprietary media format, for example, one that is designed strictly for QuickTime or strictly for Windows dominate. That is why MP3 is so popular and that is why MPEG4 is so popular.

And if you think that Windows Media isn't going to go really mobile on all these devices, you have another thing coming. Ultimately, this is the backdoor to another big domination scheme called Digital Rights Management. We are already seeing a lot of controversy now about Apple's Digital Rights Management technology. It does not matter which one of these we pick. One of them is going to end up dominating the Digital Rights Management scene and then what that leads to is a domination of content creators such as Hollywood.