WWDC 2015 postscript: competition, cooperation, and convergence

Here are three strong reactions to WWDC, all understood as a culmination of recent technology trends, and all of which, taken together, make a kind of story.

David Pierce, Wired: “It’s Official: Everyone Has the Same Plan for Tech’s Future”

Virtually everything Apple announced, someone’s done before. Split-screen multitasking! Samsung did it. A smart, context-aware personal assistant! Google. Snap two full-screen windows! Microsoft. Natural-language search! Google and Microsoft. Pin tabs! Chrome. Music! Pick your favorite of a hundred streaming music apps. Powerful notes app! Transit directions! Rewards programs for mobile payments! A news reader! Old, old, old, and old…

The amazing part is just how far the similarities go: The powerful consumer tech companies of our era, from Google to Microsoft to Apple to Samsung to Amazon and beyond, have begun to want, and build, almost exactly the same things. (Amazon was the last to try something truly different with the Fire Phone. That went poorly.) Sometimes the similarities are subtle — common gestures and interface paradigms. Others are blindingly obvious, like Windows just giving up and natively supporting iOS and Android apps. As these companies continually copy, we’re reaching something approaching perfect platform parity. The platform wars are over. The industry has collectively come to one idea about how we’ll use technology.

Then David extrapolates that this is leading to a “Perfect Operating System,” which uses common interface elements, is broadly interoperable, etc. It’s a cool idea with an unfortunate acronym that also, I think, is not where we’re headed at all. Common assumptions, yes; cross-platform services and even some development, sure; genuine interoperability, not really.

It seems clear that many companies are moving in the same direction, but also that that direction is mostly obvious and has been for a while now. Sometimes it’s easy for everyone to skate where the puck is going to be — you just all sprint after it. The voice interface and predictive assistant stuff is and has been building up drumbeat by drumbeat for a while now. All of this is as obvious as looking at the market and thinking that mobile customers might be interested in streaming music and other media on their machines.

Other things are not obvious, but necessary. Microsoft supporting iOS and Android apps was not obvious. It was necessary. Apple embracing streaming is both obvious and necessary. Fine-tuning this distinction is left as an exercise for the reader.

Charlie Warzel at Buzzfeed doesn’t see these common developments as a grand ecumenical summit, but as a… let’s not say anticompetitive, but countercompetitive move to keep users within one platform as much as possible.

All the big U.S. players in mobile — and, if we’re being honest, that’s only Google, Apple and Facebook — are working to keep their users comfortably captive inside their walled — or partially walled — gardens. For Facebook, this means turning a powerful product like Facebook Messenger, with its 600 million users, into a platform, and effectively trying to reproduce the entirety of the internet inside its own app. For Apple and Google, it means building intuitive and contextual personal assistant services like Siri and Google Now, which act as connective tissue between you and your apps and the internet at large. And, of course, these services feel seamless and more intuitive if you fully commit to their specific ecosystem. And to do so means entering something akin to a marriage with a large and powerful technology company.

There’s a problem, though. As much as Apple, Google, and Facebook love that sweet, sweet lock-in and the rich, deep data sets that walled gardens provide, the best things on every platform are and almost always have been their third-party applications. This, in fact, is what made Microsoft’s opening the developer walls so very necessary.

Platform owners want to imitate these successes, because there’s nothing more worth imitating than success, and because (let’s be charitable) they think that plugging these services in at the OS level, with full data permission flowing between the data cloud and your ID node inside it, and from one service to another, can make them better. Google does that super-well — and it’s arguable that they don’t just do it well because they’re smarter or better than other software companies, but because they have access to more and better data, both public and personal.

But the more you do this, the more you risk pissing off your developer base, unless you just buy them out, but if you don’t do this, you can lose steam against your competitors which loses your market size, which is the real thing (besides good programming environments blah blah blah) developers or rather the people who fund developers are after in the first place, until eventually you end up becoming Facebook, scary and enigmatic and possibly immortal, or more likely Twitter, just weird and sad and alone and nobody’s quite sure what to do with you next. Such is the logic of platforms.

This leads us to John Herrman’s “Nesting Trolls” at The Awl. I described John’s attitude the other day as “non-hectoring realism,” and I sometimes wonder if what confuses people about John isn’t his perceived pessimism — lots of people are pessimistic — but that he doesn’t seem to be infuriated by what is happening, or won’t pretend to be. It’s the same thing Marshall McLuhan had, where unless you were paying attention you could think he was celebrating the stuff he was just trying to understand, or portraying as an iron cage something that was just the emergence of a whole bunch of historical and social tendencies at once.

Anyways, I always try to remember one of my favorite McLuhan quotes (from The Medium is the Massage):

Here’s John, contemplating what is happening:

One moment you’re deep within an app platform reading news, two seconds later you’re sending private messages through another app that also hosts news. Media from one service appears in feeds elsewhere; the tranches of your identity represented by each swell and shrink constantly. This takes place, increasingly if not mostly, on your phone, where notifications pull you from place to place transparently and quickly enough that the process doesn’t feel like an intentional one. The phone, like the computer or the browser before it, seems neutral.

But of course it isn’t: Every path a user takes through the software on an iPhone, or an Android phone, is intentionally designed. iOS is an expression of Apple’s ambitions just as the News Feed is an expression of Facebook’s. Today’s iPhone is the product of years of refinement; its software, iOS, has been significantly altered over the last eight years, but has been refined largely in the service of one main function: running apps. Apps in a grid. Apps that open and close. Apps that were created first to access the large number of people using smartphones; apps that helped make smartphones more vital, turning that large number into an enormous one, and altering their platforms’ characters in the process. The iPhone, and Android phones, are, for different people, ways to check Facebook, or to use Snapchat, or to play games, or to take pictures, or to text on one of a dozen functionally similar services. But the hierarchy never changed. The platforms that host our conversations and our media and our social performances still answer to platforms of their own.

So, there is not one platform; there are not three platforms; there are multiple, interconnecting systems of platforms. Some of these are competitive, some cooperative, and most of them, just as people are, have elements of both cooperation and competitiveness at the same time. Some are codified and rigid; some are assumptions shared across communities or from a person in one context to the same person in another. And all of them, all of them, leave nothing unchanged — they all squeeze the toothpaste through their tube.

In retrospect, what is most amazing about the 2007 launch of the iPhone, the one moment if there is one moment for the inauguration of how things in tech and media and a good chunk of social life are today, isn’t that Apple was able to obliterate everyone’s conception of what an iPod phone would be like and how it would work. No. An iPod smartphone with a camera in it was obvious. Multitouch and some of the other developments were, if not obvious, at least weren’t unprecedented. There was a clear path to do what Apple did — they just executed it perfectly, and with panache.

What was not obvious, what was maybe only possible in that one moment — what seems almost less probable now than it did then — was that Apple was able to line up Google, Yahoo, and Cingular. Google packaged Maps; Yahoo, very nearly the Facebook of its day, delivered push email (which was a big deal at the time); and Cingular/AT&T brought visual voice mail, data support, selling the phone through Apple’s retail stores, the whole bit.

The partnership with Cingular changed the entire smartphone industry, making it really a consumer market for the first time. The partnerships with Google and Yahoo later transformed into the App Store, as well as leading to super acrimony between Apple and Google when Android devices started to look a whole lot like Apple’s, and when they couldn’t reach a deal on how to continue to share map data.

Look at the folks Apple trots out as third-party partners these days. Video game guys, folks who make magazines, Drake. Only musicians and/or people who desperately need Apple need apply.

What’s great about that moment in 2007 is a number of enormous companies being able to say “these are the things we do well; none of us can do all of them on our own; let’s find a way to do them together.”

I don’t think that kind of partnership will happen again, until and unless folks get desperate. The benefits of borrowing from each other and building up the whole stack are too obvious. But I think building these things together is one of the few ways that we get something that’s genuinely new.