Renfield Kuroda wrote:
>The bigger issue is: the Internet is fine and open and all that, but if you
>are interested in having a successful business, making people pay for the
>free, open Internet is a model that has never worked.
>
>I like the fact that the wireless web is a walled garden -- it's why i-mode
>is successful and WAP services, so far, are not.
>
>Blatant self-plug:
>
>"Are Walled Gardens Such a Bad Thing?"
>http://www.japaninc.net/feedback/letter/letter01.html#gardens
Renfield makes some good comments about how DoCoMo's approach, which
focused on the experience and not the technology, made the service easy
to use and popular. Others are right in likening DoCoMo with AOL, who
worked hard to provide useful, fun, easy-to-use content and services to
customers (AOL, with its chatrooms, mostly sells its customers to each
other).
The problem with walled gardens is when they fragment a network into
several smaller networks. Just as Metcalf's law states that the value of
a network grows by the square of the size of the network, as you make the
size of the networks smaller the value of the network FALLS by the square
of the size.
So, although an individual operator may make more money through a walled
garden approach (by having more locked in customers than they would in an
open network) society overall loses because the sum of the value of the
several smaller networks is less than the value one large network would
have, even if the number of nodes are the same.
So, AOL's proprietary servers + internet probably is not too bad for the
network, but their walled garden approach to Instant Messaging
_definately_ makes the network less valuable _over all_ than it could
have been (although AOL may be making more money personally).
Neilson makes this point in this rather good article:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990725.html
zimran@creativegood.com
Creative Good
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212.736.2075
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Received on Wed Oct 18 17:34:23 2000