Software as an Investment in an Ecosystem

Here’s the thing about using commercial (proprietary) software: you are not buying software, or even software-as-a-service.  You’re buying into an ecosystem.  Let me quickly provide examples, rather than pontificating endlessly.

Take the iPhone.  I really like the iPhone.  A good friend of mine just bought a shiny new iPhone 3G S.  She was moving from Verizon, and had used their oh-so-handy Backup Assistant to backup her addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc.  The problem was that Verizon doesn’t really have a way to get the data out of their system.  So, it’s great so long as you stick with Verizon, but as soon as she wanted to switch to AT&T and grab her contacts, she had a problem. (For the curious, I actually extracted the data from her phone, a Motorola, with BitPim, exported from BitPim to vCards, and imported from vCards to Apple’s Address Book, at which point I recommended taking the same vCards file and importing it into Google Contacts as a nice central storage point that does allow you to export.)

The point here is that she invested the time to input roughly 250 contacts into a proprietary system but didn’t have 1) an exit strategy or 2) a plan to keep the system forever.  This is common – when you invest a ton of time in a piece of technology (either by inputting data to it, or learning it) you need to have a plan for what happens to your data (or your skill) if that tool goes away for some reason.  Google Contacts was a good replacement: it is accessible via the web and exports to three different (plain-text) formats that are widely used and can be backed up locally.

Second example: investment of time in learning a proprietary piece of software.  Another good friend of mine is very interested in photography and image editing.  So, he, being motivated, took a class to learn Photoshop and even got the educational discount on Photoshop when he took the class.  The $500 or so isn’t that big of deal, but coupled with the hundreds of hours learning the tool, starts to become a major investment of the only two things we have in life: time and money.

Here’s the problem: the one thing you can be sure of is that you will get a new computer.  People like me upgrade more often than most (every 18-24 months in my case, and I’m not even a gamer), and probably own more regularly-used computers than most (desktop, laptop and netbook).  So the problem becomes apparent: If I invest a few hundred dollars and hundreds or thousands of hours in learning Photoshop (or Excel, or whatever), I have to worry about having that tool wherever I am (on my desktop at home, on my laptop at work, on my netbook at the airport) and whenever I am (today, a year from today, 10 years from today).  And that is when the cost mounts: you are willing to spend lots of time to learn how to use the tool, but that investment represents a hook.  Now, you have an enormous incentive to continue spending money to buy new versions of the software for all your machines that span the space and time you occupy.

So, when my good friend bought a new computer, he had the problem of getting a new copy of Photoshop for it, because he was now heavily invested in the ecosystem surrounding the tool.  He knew how to use the tool, but he also relied on the vast pool of resources on the web related to Photoshop: tutorials, plugins, templates and interoperability.  So, the investment isn’t just his time, his money, and his skill, but also an expectation that certain associated resources surrounding the product will be there for you, as a user.  This is the product’s ecosystem.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t invest in proprietary software systems; I’m saying you should do so with your eyes open to the true costs of the investment – don’t just look at the ecosystem that the iPhone has and think “Everyone has one…and it has 100,000 apps, it’s the way to go!”  Recognize that your are now necessarily going to be compelled to use all the associated iPhone tools, and you will invest yourself in learning how to use them.  Many commercial software vendors recognize this effect: there is a good reason that Microsoft gives away most of their products freely to students.  These companies realize that your willingness to spend the time to learn new tools will trump your desire to hang on to your hard-earned dollars. That is the strategy to keep the money flowing.

So, what can you do when you see this happening to you? You can change your expectations. You can treat the commercial software as a single point in a space of solutions to your needs, and keep an open mind about switching. Learn the tool from the perspective of approaches it offers to solving problems, and try out other (perhaps Free) tools with which the same approach can be applied. In the case of Verizon, you could look at Google Contacts, Plaxo, Thunderbird, or Apple’s Address book. In the case of Photoshop, you can, depending on your needs, look at The Gimp, Picasa, Paint.NET, iPhoto, Paint Shop Pro, or Aperture. But, when you pick a solution, recognize that your computer and your needs will change, and be prepared for it.