The Beatles closed their final album, Abbey Road, with the line:

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

Turns out the Beatles would have been pretty good at running a software company in the 21st century.  We’re seeing a whole lot of love in the form of press coverage and dollars going out to software companies who are willing to share the love in the form of opening up their software and platforms for their customers to use, extend, and build on.  Companies that are good at this (see Microsoft, SalesForce.com, Facebook, Google, and Zillow) are rewarded for their openness and see sky-high user adoption, while companies that struggle with this (see AOL, MySpace, Skype, and possibly LinkedIn) ultimately suffer and are certainly not seen as visionaries in their industries.

It seems that a lot of companies like the idea of owning a customer’s solution completely, from end-to-end, while most customers do not.  Customers want to be able to build their IT infrastructure the way it actually works best for them, not the way the software company says it SHOULD work best for them.  It’s why service-oriented architectures are so hot these days.  Smart companies realize that the value of their product is not just what it’s capable of by itself, but the value it brings to the enterprise as a whole as well.

Companies that don’t open up their software end up forcing their customers to purchase third-party software or invest heavily in custom development, just to accomplish what could easily be had from a truly open system.  I can tell you from first-hand experience that systems integration is typically one of the most difficult things an enterprise IT department does.  But when the systems you’re integrating are open and accessible the integration goes much smoother, middleware becomes a lot less important, and you usually end up using the software in ways that the company who made it probably didn’t even envision.  (I know that’s happened a lot to us at Latigent, our customers are some pretty creative people—looking at you Mr. Langel ;)

There is a definite a first-mover advantage to be had by being the first to open up.  The first company to open their software is seen as visionary, generates a lot of good and excited press and customer goodwill, as well as creating an ecosystem of developers, partners, and third-party vendors who further add value to customers.  The rest of the industry, who inevitably follow suit eventually anyway because of market pressure, are just seen as copycats trying to figure out how to play catch-up.

And the big nut, probably the biggest reason why it’s so vital for software to be open, is because only open software has the opportunity to be the platform on which complete enterprise solutions are built.  Everyone wants to be “the platform”, but not everyone is open enough to truly be an effective platform.  Microsoft has done a very good job of being open, and Linux is gaining traction primarily for the reason that it’s very open by nature (in addition to being free, which never hurts either).

The catch is, your motives have to be right before you can really be open.  If you’re doing it to better serve your customers then the open initiative is going to be a resounding success.  If you’re doing it for the press aspect or to subversively create customer lock-in, it will fail.  History is littered with failed attempts to create open API’s that were really a thinly-veiled attempt to sell a new proprietary system and more licenses or take control of a standardization effort (they all failed eventually).

It’s also a mistake to charge money to customers for the privilege to use your “open” platform.  I see a lot of enterprise-level companies making the mistake of establishing a closed developer program and charging a lot of money just for people to get a look at their API’s.  This is protectionism at its worst, what it’s really doing is forcing the customer and the third-party ecosystem to jump through hoops before they can even think about using your software for other purposes or integrating it with other systems.  In the end this only keeps the software from being used as a more integral part of the ecosystem, cripples the user and developer community, and ultimately hurts sales.

The RIGHT way to get to true openness is by working and collaborating with others.  By engaging the customers, partners, and yes, even competitors to establish standards and figure out what’s going to best serve the customers at the end of the day.  Instead of going off blindly blazing new trails that might be going in the wrong direction, it’s important to have a cohesive over-arching strategy guiding the openness effort, which ultimately needs to be about making customers happy and enthusiastic.

As both a software vendor and a customer it’s encouraging for me to see more and more companies going open with their software.  It all adds up to a happier existence as a customer, more value to my own customers, and more profitability all around.  After all, the more you give, the more you get.