The cost of monoculture
Gen has a well organized post on how monoculture affects software adoption and development. He uses Korea as example. The recent news break - shocking for some; hilarious for the rest of us - with the Korean governmental ministries warning its citizen users from upgrading to Vista due to Active X Controls. Vista would halt all secure online transactions including banking and e-commerce.
Again, Korea’s social collectiveness comes into question. Gen’s post definitely puts
Gen notes
Korea will only get beyond this problem by 1) applying Korean laws on open standards to the certificate authorities, 2) reassigning new certificates which work with open web standards to all Koreans, 3) reprogramming all Korean websites to support 128 bit SSL which will allow for a heterogeneous marketplace of operating systems and web browsers. This is a herculean task and thus Korea stays hostage to Redmond.
In my previous post, I point out that the social machine awards the crowd favorite and penalizes the individual. The crowd selects solutions upon peer pressure. Monkey see, monkey do. In Korea, the Long Tail does not exist. The Long Tail in this instance would be open source and all solutions NOT Microsoft.
Extending the monocultural theme but giving hope Korea can break from the hostage-takers (i.e., Microsoft, Qualcomm), Korea was also suspect when it came to mobile communications technology. Up until recently (before the availability of HSDPA), business travelers had to chuck their GSM-enabled mobiles in favor of the CDMA phones.
GSM is supported by a heterogeneous lot of chipmakers, S/W, and H/W developers. Thus reigns supreme with 2 billion subscriptions worldwide or 90% of new digital wireless subscriptions. Whereas the tightly controlled Qualcomm monopoly called CDMA continues to lose marketshare. With SK Telecom and KTF adopting the HSDPA as their choice for the next generation telecommunications, there is a glimmer of hope.
Link: Gen Kanai weblog: the cost of monoculture.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Thanks for the link and the comments.
February 2nd, 2007 at 11:56 am
Gen, kudos to your enlightening post. Looking forward to the China post.