[Business2.0 homage #1]
Back in July 2007, there was a article in Business 2.0 about making mashups easy for non-technical users. As more and more users embrace web technologies, companies have looked for ways to provide a way for the unfettered masses to take advantage of the latest and greatest that the Internet has to offer. Internet publishing is a prime example of how a previously complex process (coding HTML, creating images, creating dynamic pages, FTP’ing files, etc) turned into blogging, which is now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection who can type and remember their login and password.
What I don’t get is all of the companies that seem to be basing their business model on the current zeitgeist of getting free access to someone else’s content and/or technology. The most obvious example of this is Google Maps. Everyone and their brother seems to overlay some sort of data on top of Google Maps (apartment/house listings, gas station prices, movie landmarks, running routes, political donations, transit, dating, TV shows, etc).
This is great if you are a programmer and are just creating the mashup for fun or practice or if you are a non-profit/government agency, since there is no financial incentive for keeping the mashup up working. But plenty of companies are building applications that rely on this information in order to provide key features and functionality. The value of their site or information is based in large part on the map data provided for free (and without ads) by Google.
What happens when Google decides that you (or your customers/subscribers) are sufficiently hooked on the data and cannot live without it? Do you think that Google will just say, “Well, it’s for the good of the people…we’ll give it to them for free”? Of course not. They will start charging for use of the data or access to the API or both. Is your business or product designed to deal with that? Can it work with other mapping software (Yahoo!maps, MapQuest)? Does it stand alone without the map data?
To a certain degree, all products rely on other products to become reality. My own product has many open-source components that take care of the more mundane functions so that my development team can focus on the core capabilities of the product. I don’t want them spending time re-inventing something that someone else has already built. I want them thinking about how to leapfrog past competitor’s products or how make a complicated product process more simple.
The trade-off for that decision is that I am putting the success of my product in the hands of others. If they (the provider of the code that I am using to supplement my product) stop making updates or don’t make them in a timely fashion, I either have to have my engineers yank the code and replace it with something else or write something themselves, which takes away from the time that they have to write the product-specific code (and introduces all kinds of regression testing nightmares). If the issue is security-related, then my headaches multiply.
But let me be frank, using open-source components in a product is NOT the same as relying on a FREE API. Open-source software is governed by a distribution license and is frequently made available with paid support, which means that someone on the other end is accountable, at least on paper. Google (or the programmer who built the mashup tool you or your developer(s) are using can easily yank the carpet out from underneath your feet. What are you going to do about it? Complain to them that you build your business model/product on their free technology and now they have ruined it for you? Good luck.
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Tags: API, applications, Business 2.0, consumers, maps, mashup, open-source, trade-off, transit
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[…] wrote earlier about how I was confused about why someone would base their business on someone else’s APIs. I found this article on Programmable Web about a company called YottaMusic that had done just that […]