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Internet guru

CHRIS Anderson* is the editor of Wired Magazine, an authority on tech culture, trends and innovation and named by Time magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential thinkers.

He is best known for popularising two key ideas that have helped to shape internet thinking: the Long Tail and Freemium. Companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix are long-tail companies, using the internet’s ability to reach a wide, varied and niche audience at a fraction of the costs.

Freemium is the idea that if you offer basic products or services for free, and charge for advanced features, you'll be more successful.

In this extract from an interview with Matthew Buckland of technology trends website Memeburn, Anderson shares his thoughts on the future of the web and how technology is shaping the future.

MB: For me, what makes today's web and mobile sites or platforms successful is "simplicity". We live in an age of distraction and we have lots competing for our attention. Do you think simplicity, the concept, is key to the successes of many of the large successful internet companies of today?

CA: Yes, I think that's well put. Simplicity is one way to put it. It's lowering the barrier to entry. It's clear what to do and it's clear how to do it. That's crucial. I think what we've learnt from Apple is focusing on clear easy benefits. It's the key to their success. All companies have lessons to learn there.

Google has clearly made some mistakes in social (media) by building products that were too complex to both use and understand. I think Google+ is an effort to make something simpler and more obvious. It's obviously more complex than Twitter.

One could argue that for all Twitter's success, its simplicity is also a constraint in that it's hard for the service to evolve to address secondary issues of true conversations without adding a whole layer of complexity that’s contrary to their mission. I do take your point, and broadly, simplicity is something every successful product has - but it can't be the only thing it has.

MB: It seems you're quite wary on commenting on what Apple should or shouldn't do - but here's a big question: we've seen how Android has grown in numbers, so do you think that Apple should open source its platform like that of Google's Android?

CA: I am not going to go there. My tablet is an iPad, and my phone is Android. I live in both worlds. I am huge open-source evangelist. As you know, my robotics company is 100% open source. I fully understand the advantages of open source, but that said, I love my tablet. I think that the Apple model, a closed system in the hands of a visionary genius, is a beautiful thing. So I am not really dogmatic about this, I think there is a place for both open and closed. I wouldn't want the world to be only one or only the other. I think Apple is doing just fine. They don't need to deviate from a successful model.

MB: Looking at the open ecosystems and the closed ecosystems that you've come across, what would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of either of these?

CA: There are books to be written on that. It's a big question. Broadly, the strength of openness is that you get a breadth of participation and lots of new ideas come in. There's lots of energy, there are applications you wouldn't have thought of and you could do faster, cheaper and better in open.

The downside of open is that, in the absence of clear leadership and vision, it can become chaotic and over-burdened with things that are very interesting to software engineers but not very interesting to the rest of the world. We've definitely seen lots of open source software projects become over-complicated.

And to your earlier point about simplicity, the genius of Firefox is that in the hands of strong leaders they've managed to make it a simple and easy to use product, despite all the bells and whistles that software engineers might want to put in. So I do think that openness is an incredibly powerful technique, but requires a very special class of strong leaders with clear visions to be successful.

The success of closed is that you have the traditional form of command-and-control organisation, so that a clear vision can create a good product without having to jump through all sorts of hoops in inventing new organisational structures. In the open source world if you have a clear vision that's not enough, you also need to create an organisational structure that incentivises all these volunteers to follow your vision.

In a company it's really easy, you pay them and you tell them what to do. So I would say that leadership and vision is easier to execute in a closed system than it is in an open system. But in those rare cases where you have leaders with both vision and organisational skills, an open system can get you there faster.

MB: What technologies do you think are defining our future in the web and the media world?

CA: Obviously the shift towards mobile and tablets and smartphones in particular is the biggest driver. I think what we're seeing here is an opportunity to rethink the user interface, rethink the experience of consuming media. It's rethinking pricing, rethinking how we get media, rethinking what social means as a form of marketing.

So it's like the web was 20 years ago, it's a brand new domain. Nobody really knows anything and we're all groping in the dark. We've learnt a lot from the web about what works and what doesn't work and I think that we have an opportunity to right some wrongs.

For example, on the tablet this time these platforms have come out with an eCommerce model built in via the iTunes or Android stores. This means we have the capacity to try different pricing and economic models. Before, we didn't have the physical ability so everything had to default towards banner ads as a business model.

But now we have the capacity to do everything from Freemium to micropayments to pure paid content. We have the capacity to integrate with social and really understand what people want, how they get content in a way we didn't have 20 years ago on the web.

Obviously we continue to do print and the web as well as we can and innovate there, but mobile is an opportunity for us to really come at these questions of what business we are in anew, and through radical experiments in trying to figure out what consumer behaviour is going to look like and how people want to interact with our products on tablets and smartphones.

As Wired magazine it's our job to be a laboratory for these things. You'll see more and more experiments coming out in that.

* Chris Anderson is a speaker at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit on Wednesday. 

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