Jonathan Zittrain

Wired just published a short Q&A about my forthcoming book.  I thought I’d share a little bit more of the argument in the meantime, since it’s awfully hard to get across a book’s worth of argument in just a few hundred words of a Q&A — which, of course, was much longer before it was edited.

There are two prevailing business models for putting out tech platforms today: one that I call “generative,” because it allows third parties to build upon it and share what they do (think PC, whether Mac, Linux, or Windows, where anyone can write software for it); and one not generative. The non-generative business model is technology more like an appliance, in ways both good and bad. There, the only entity that can change the way it operates is the vendor or service provider (think xbox, iphone, ipod, etc.). Sometimes third parties can write code for these appliances, but they need clearance before they can share it with everyone else.

I don’t mind those gadgets in the second category, but I’m concerned that they will come to predominate. If they do, we’ll get reliable, even fun, devices, but we’ll lose much of the innovation that’s been responsible for some of the best aspects of the Net and the PC, including such advancements as the Web browser.

I don’t think this is inevitable. The PC has indeed made inroads magnitudes more significant than CB ever did.  But appliances can cherry-pick some of the most appealing aspects of the PC without carrying over the generative qualities that keep innovation flowing. If we don’t face the security problems latent in such generative platforms — and yes, they’re in Linux and Macs, too, because the question is whether the user will make poor choices about what code to run, not whether a given OS has a “flaw” — then we may lose the generative PC as the center of the ecosystem.