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.