Zeichick’s Take: The danger of monocultures
July 19, 2010 —
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When you think about a modern software monoculture, which company do you think of first? Chances are that it’s Apple. However, if I asked that question between, say, 1995 and 2007, you probably would have said Microsoft.
In agriculture, a monoculture is when too much of a region plants exactly the same crops. If there’s a disease or pest that destroys that crop, the entire region is in big trouble. Similarly, if the economics of that crop change (like a price collapse), everyone is in trouble too. That’s why diversity is often healthier and more sustainable at the macroeconomic level.
However, the problem with a monoculture is that it’s attractive. If all your neighbors are planting a certain crop and are making a fortune, you probably want to do that too. In other words, while monocultures are bad society as a whole, they’re often better for individuals—at least until something goes wrong.
Microsoft’s dominance over the past couple of decades turned into a monoculture. Vast numbers of consumers and enterprises standardized on Windows and Office, because that’s what they knew, that’s what was in stores, that’s where the applications were, and because for them personally, it seemed to be the right choice to go with the flow.
While there were alternatives, like Unix and Linux and the Macintosh, those remained niche products (especially on corporate desktops) because a monoculture rewards jumping on the bandwagon. Monocultures foster a lack of competition and a desire to play it safe. Nobody wants to upset the bandwagon. And thus, real innovation at Microsoft didn’t make it into Windows and Office, leaving room for the Macintosh to take risks, build a compelling product and start taking market share, and for Linux to tackle and win the early netbook market.
Today, Microsoft’s Windows and Office still dominate the enterprise. But even with Windows 7, I don’t think that customers are quite as willing to just do whatever Microsoft says as they used to be.
In the smartphone wars, the iPhone never became a true monoculture; there are too many BlackBerrys and other devices. However, certainly the media acts as if the iPhone is the only game in town. Apple plays into the perceptions of monoculture, offering essentially one model handset (now the iPhone 4), with the only variations being a choice of two colors and three memory configurations.
Related Search Term(s): Apple, mobile development
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