Platform Wars: A brief history presented at Web 2.0 EXPO, NYC Rolf Skyberg Platform Product Manager and Evangelist for eBay, Inc. http://rolfsky.com [email_address] Friday, June 5, 2009

we're coming up on lunch for the first full day

you are no doubt waiting for something delicious

that O'Reilly has seen fit to order in massive crates and buckets

and before you go stuff you bellies, I'm glad you came here to stuff your heads instead.

whenever I go to conferences,

it always seems like somehow the sessions on the website

are always so much more interesting than when you actually get here.

some of you have probably already started wandering,

looking for something vaguely interesting to attend.

(remember it's just 50 short minutes until lunch)

and hopefully that Something Interesting is this talk right here.

my job title at eBay is part Product Manager, part evangelist,

sometimes developer,

and always interpreter .

my main job is to inspire and excite individuals both inside and outside eBay

by any means necessary.

a little history about myself:

my University major was business,

but I also minored in theatre

and later pursued graduate studies in System Science

“ System Science” is the study of complex interactions over time,

including topics like: computer networks, economics, traffic flow and human actions.

system science is focused on exploring patterns within complex systems,

abstracting those patterns,

and reapplying those patterns to different areas.

this morning, we’re going to be learning about platform wars ,

exploring history and the near future,

and equipping you with tools to make good decisions.

along the way, we’ll run into some colorful topics such as:

wily inventors,

scheming corporations,

lovable platypuses,

delicious Oreo cookies,

and super villains in the punch-card industry.

before we jump into the fun stuff, let's get some business out of the way first:

the following program is brought to you with limited interruption

by eBay

eBay is a Web 2.0 Platinum Sponsor because we think we have a pretty cool platform

and you should know about it.

(we’re thrilled this talk is open to all attendees)

Welcome!

let's do what we came here to do,

kill 50 minutes before lunch.

this topic can easily kill 50 minutes.

I spent many semi-productive hours at my desk researching this topic,

XKCD probably describes my server logs best:

platform wars

I’m going to start with a platform war

you all know, and love (?)

HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray.

as you know, both of these discs are trying to do one thing,

get you fancy-schmancy HD content

onto your fancy-schmancy HDTV.

in one corner we have the logical-sounding successor,

“HD”-DVD

and in the other corner, we have a competitor which sounds more like

something from the cartoon “Duck Dodgers in the 24 & 1/2 th Century”

Blu-Ray.

Blu-Ray. pew! pew! pew!

by the way, Sony’s misspelling of BLU-RAY is intentional, because you can’t ™ the name “blue-ray”

the HD-DVD standard was proposed by DVD Forum,

the same committee that decided on the original DVD standard

and included the heavyweights of Microsoft and Toshiba,

while Blu-Ray was pretty much the private project of Sony and friends.

the full rundown is as follows:

Blu-Ray disc supporters: Apple, Dell, HP, Hitachi, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK, Thomson, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Sony Entertainment, MGM, Buena Vista, VU Games, and EA Games.

HD-DVD supporters: the DVD standards committee, Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft, New Line Cinema, Paramount, Universal, and WB.

if the general public was asked straight out:

“ which name sounds better?”

HD-DVD is the logical extension of the DVD format

right?

unfortunately the question is in more than a name…

let’s look at the differences:

an HD-DVD is a shiny, plastic disc

which is 12cm across and approximately 1.2 mm in thickness

while the totally different Blu-Ray disc

is 12cm across and approximately 1.2mm in thickness

with a special anti-scratch coating!

maybe they don’t look much physically different,

but when you put them into their respective players, things start to stand out,

HD-DVD is capable of 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution

at an impressive 25 frames per second

Blu-Ray only supports 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution

at 24 frames per second.

still not convinced?

how about the fact that both support: Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS-HD?

and both are protected (somewhat) with 128-bit AACS digital rights management,

and both support the advanced h.264/mpeg4 video codec.

hopefully at this point,

your eyes should be glossing over

and your fingers itching for your blackberries.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD?

basically, the exact same thing.

zeroing in on the real differences,

we see one technical discrepancy, and one political one.

on the technical side,

the Blu-Ray disc pioneered by Sony is using a next-gen laser-pickup system

while the DVD Forum has opted for an easier-to-manufacture pickup system,

allowing those discs to be manufactured more easily

on the same equipment as plain-jane DVDs.

this allows Blu-Ray discs slightly larger storage capacity and maximum video transfer speed,

(but not that you’d really notice).

on the political side,

we see a tiny difference,

something you likely don’t care about whatsoever:

the way menus are created when viewing the disc.

Blu-Ray has opted for an elaborate programmable java-based menu system

creatively named: “Blu-Ray Disc Java”

while Microsoft and Disney pushed their own pet menuing system,

similarly creatively named “HD Interactive”

which is a Frankenstein of XML and EMCA Script

(known to you and me as Javascript)

at one point,

HP recognized that everybody wasn’t playing nice

and pleaded with the two groups to merge on one standard,

combining the “best” of both worlds,

Blu-Ray’s higher capacity,

with HDi’s easier-to-program interface.

for who knows what reasons,

the sides refused to compromise and thus was born

an eye-roll worthy “battle”.

in the beginning,

consumers didn’t express much of a preference between the two.

theoretically, Blu-Ray had “better” video quality,

but HD-DVD also cost less. (thanks to some aggressive pricing)

truth be told,

consumers weren’t very excited and didn’t flock to buying either format.

while the original DVD format had been a smashing success,

this new HDTV thing not only required a brand-new television,

but the know-how about how to hook it up

(hint: don’t use the yellow wire)

Blu-Ray had made increasing initial inroads

because every PlayStation3 was also a Blu-Ray player,

while the XBOX 360 required the purchase of an external HD-DVD player.

(amusingly enough, the Playstation 3 is still considered the “reference” quality player for many technology reviewers)

but in early 2007,

a decree by Sony breathed some temporary life into HD-DVD.

apparently, Sony wasn’t going to allow… adult content

on Blu-Ray discs.

wha wha hwa?

no pr 0 n?

commenters on the internet predicted the swift demise of the format

which didn’t support all forms of human entertainment.

afterall, on what format would the adult film industry distribute their

several thousand titles per year?

hanging on by a thread, the stalemate continued from the release in 2006

up until Toshiba’s admission of defeat in early 2008.

the final killing blow?

Warner Brothers and Wal-Mart, decided.

they couldn’t afford to have the stalemate go on any longer

two formats means that they have to support both for their consumers

so both vowed to no longer create or sell titles on HD-DVD.

shortly thereafter, Toshiba acknowledged that they couldn’t compete

without backing from major labels and retailers

and exited the HD-DVD player and disc market.

and why should you care?

aside from the potential guilt associated with

owning discs on a failed format,

it teaches us a larger lesson:

you will inevitably run into situations where you need to make a choice:

what platforms should you pursue?

better or worse, platforms offer leverage into markets,

markets you can’t reach yourself

and they also reduce costs of business.

(just make sure you pick the right one)

your presentation will resume in 30 seconds

by the way, did you know eBay just announced our "Open eBay Platform" at our developer's conference in June?

as part of our platform, we allow you to create and embed applications directly within eBay itself.

it's like developing a widget for Facebook, except we have SDKs, a dedicated developer’s program,

and a built in revenue stream which already pays out

millions of dollars a year to our 3rd parties.

(just something to think about)

now I lured you in here by announcing that I would be talking about platform wars,

but what is a platform, really?

I love to look at the roots of words, so let’s explore the word “platform.”

if we break it up into its roots,

we have two parts,

plat + form.

“ plat” refers to a wide, flat area

and forms the same root as “plateau”.

on the second half, we have “form”

which pretty much means what it sounds like,

the “ shape ” of it.

a platform is something flat-shaped.

usually this has come to mean a flat-shaped raised area.

when we look at wikipedia, the disambiguation page has a long lists of various “platforms”:

railway platforms, computing platforms, political platforms, platform games, oil platforms, automobile platforms, and platform shoes.

not to mention the just plain old platform ,

which is a “raised, level surface”.

we can broadly classify these terms into two categories,

those relating to actual raised level surfaces,

and those related to collections of statements, policies, or implementations.

Super Mario Brothers is a platform game

because you’re trying to stay on top of various raised (sometimes level) platforms

and the same holds true with platform shoes,

railroad platforms

and oil platforms.

use of “platform” in the political sense comes from 1803,

when people used to stand up on platforms

and state their party principles,

you know, before YouTube, text messages, and CNN.

suddenly, a platform isn’t just the thing

it’s what you say

when you’re on top of the thing.

it’s a collection of promises you’re making.

it’s from this sense that we derive the other notions of “platform”.

political platforms are whatever they say to get you to vote,

computing platforms are series of conventions, services, resources, and standards you can program to,

and automobile platforms are shared components or architectures.

automobile platforms are also how you can change

a Japanese Subaru Impreza

into a Swedish Saab 9-3 “Saabaru”

if your blood sugar is starting to get low,

fixate a moment on this platypus and an Oreo,

one of the two shares something in common with platforms

if you guessed the platypus, you’re right!

(if you guessed the Oreo, here’s hoping you stay awake)

“platy-pus”

actually means

flat-footed.

(though it is also flat-beaked, and entirely bizarre)

and although platypuses (platypii?)

are not war-like creatures,

platforms seem to be.

there’s more to this than just HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray

or even Beta versus VHS.

Wikipedia helpfully outlines no fewer than

27 notable platform or format wars since 1900.

perhaps unsurprisingly,

many of these format wars have been in the realm of audio/video reproduction,

as these were the first “virtual” industries

where controlling a platform was lucrative

because cost of reproduction was minimal.

ticked off that your shiny iPod can’t play your collection of Ogg Vorbis audio files?

consider yourself lucky.

if you are old enough to remember the early 1900’s,

this whole problem would remind you

of the great player-piano format wars

before the iPod, the Zune, and even the Walkman,

a player-piano was about the only way to “own” music.

but each manufacturer had their own special size of piano music

and if you wanted to listen to your music at a friend’s house, you were pretty much out of luck.

(wait, what year are we talking about again?)

your punch-cards wouldn’t fit into their piano.

the squabbling finally ended in 1908

when all manufacturers agreed that a standard player-piano paper roll

would be 11.25 inches wide with holes spaced 9 per inch.

(there’s no word of if the adult player-piano industry had any influence in this decision)

in other news,

a format was raging simultaneously over what DJ’s would spin:

“stacks of wax”

“long cylinders of wax”

two methods of recording audio had been invented

roughly at a similar time,

one with technical superiority:

cylinders played at perfect pitch because the track speed remained constant as they spun

and you could also record your own audio,

while another had practical superiority:

big 2-dimensional pieces of vinyl were much easier to produce

and took up less storage space than cylinders.

the battle ended when a begrudging Thomas Edison,

acknowledged that flat recordings were better

(and his competitor’s patent ran out, years later).

yet even after Edison and everyone else

decided that flat records were the way to go,

which direction were you supposed to record them in?

up and down vibrations?

side to side vibrations?

not to mention:

should you spin 12-inch “LP” discs at 33 1/3 rpms,

or smaller 7-inch “EP” discs at 45 rpm?

(luckily the latter problem was easily solved by adding a switch for controlling speed on the player)

we should remind ourselves however,

about the specific idea of a platform war.

there are lots of competing technologies available at similar times

that we don’t automatically label as a war.

in order for a full blown “war” to be made out of it,

a few base conditions must be satisfied.

# 1 : the two technologies must be significantly similar in both application, availability, overall cost and functionality.

an uneven balance in any of these doesn’t lead to a war,

it’s usually an “unsuccessful entry into the market”, or “somebody got crushed”.

# 2 the two technologies must be introduced at relatively the same time so that neither has an insurmountable lead within the consumer base.

examples for this are slim,

because products with similar cost/features as an incumbent product are rarely successful. (or memorable)

# 3 there must be some type of “lock-in” that forces participants to essentially choose one or the other.

usually this is in the form of a hardware device

which is expensive enough to preclude the buying of two separate pieces.

think Mac vs. PC,

or Ford vs. Chevy.

# 4 even though the items must be fairly well matched, a roughly equal number of “winning points” must be distributed across the two platforms.

Blu-Ray could fit more movie, but HD-DVD was cheaper.

Beta video tapes could be copied many times with little degradation,

but VHS tapes could record an entire NFL football game.

these subtle points are enough to get (and keep) people bickering about which is better.

if you don’t believe how important subtleties can be,

ask an audiophile about how “warm and lifelike” vinyl records are,

then go listen to a CD which is perfect digital copy,

each has their valid argument.

it seems like these platforms tend to cause more chaos than help,

so why do we continue to build new platforms?

in essence, a platform is a giant lever into a market.

platforms make your life easier

both as a consumer and as a developer.

having agreement on one high-definition optical disc format

is a useful thing,

because then you’ll only have to own one player (or a PS3),

and as a developer or content creator, you can focus your resources

on only delivering to one set of guidelines.

what if you needed a different set of tires to drive on the freeway?

or a plugin to view email sent by a competitor’s email service,

or if everybody got to make up their own HTML tags?

Netscape, you’re not excused here for that damned <blink> tag,

and Microsoft you are not excused for the damnable <marquee> tag.

this makes life easier for everybody involved.

another advantage to using a platform,

is that you’re in this “together”.

either someone like you has probably already run into that problem,

or the platform creators have been actively preventing against it.

either way, there’s people out there to help,

even if that’s taking care of nitty-gritty stuff that you don’t want to deal with.

(also, if you and your competitor are on the same platform,

it’s easier to know what they might be capable of)

in a recent blog post, Dare Obasanjo laid out three principles

for a sufficiently interesting software platform:

# 1 it needs to offer compelling differentiation to the developer,

# 2 it must offer cost reductions by participating,

# 3 it should offer access to distribution channels that are otherwise unavailable.

your presentation will resume in 15 seconds.

by the way, did you know that eBay just announced our &quot;Open eBay Platform&quot; at our developer's conference in June?

our well-documented platform offers distribution to a huge collection of unique buyers and sellers while providing a proven monetization strategy.

check it out at developer.ebay.com or come visit us in our booth #1511

and register to win a Nintendo Wii!

if platforms are so useful,

what’s with all the strife,

can’t we all just get along?

in a perfect world, you might be able to,

but often the platform creators themselves have an interest in seeing success.

even at the cost of their competitors, if need be.

(remember, Sony produces not only Blu-Ray players, but also Blu-Ray disc manufacturing plants, computer hardware businesses and a significant collection of media as well)

going back to the high-definition optical disc format war,

why was Sony unwilling to compromise the format they’d crafted?

what’s wrong with including the HDi menuing system

instead of Blu-Ray Java?

they did it all for the nookie

or the cookie….

or, actually,

the royal ties.

we all probably think of royalties

as fees an artist gets paid when their content is used,

or an episode of BayWatch appears in syndication,

but hardware and software manufacturers have their own little royalty game going.

because Sony is essentially the rights-holder to the Blu-Ray format,

they can charge “whatever” they like in royalties

each time a Blu-Ray drive is manufactured,

or a Blu-Ray disc is pressed.

in the long-gone days of DVD sales,

royalties for manufacturing a drive could be as much as $4/drive

in license fees.

some sources are now quoting Blu-Ray royalties

as much as $30 per drive,

not including the per-disc creation fee.

now we begin to understand the war a little better.

perhaps Microsoft was attempting to disrupt Sony

and their strangle-hold on a format

even if they knew they wouldn’t win?

competition might have kept the per-drive license fees much lower

(perhaps zero on a Microsoft-installed PC),

and every $30 not spent on an optical media drive,

can be spent on a shiny operating system instead.

so you been sitting here now for a series of minutes,

and what’s the nugget for you?

avoid platform wars like the plague.

as a participant on the respective platforms,

you don’t want a war,

you want a happy, shiny world of puppies and kittens.

platforms == good

platform wars == bad

the movie rental business became a lot more simple

when video stores didn’t have to stock both VHS and Beta tapes,

and you’ll be a lot more productive if you’re not worrying about your platform.

in addition to the 4 platform war conditions,

it helps to identify when someone is pushing a bad platform.

here’s a few indicators that should trigger your Spider-sense:

# 1 one platform spends a significant amount of time bad-mouthing or sabotaging the other,

because any time and energy spent on these aggressive activities, is time not spent improving the platform and delivering differentiating qualities.

# 2 the platform seems “rushed” so they can fulfill the goal of being launched against a competitor,

this is a tactic often employed as a stop-gap measure used to slow down the growth of another platform,

and can be successful even if you don’t have a complete specification;

just the notion that two industry heavies are competing

will cause many potential participants to hold back.

# 3 beware of any platform which precludes you (in a legal, or financial sense) from pursuing other platforms.

why are they attempting to lock you in now and limit your options?

that doesn’t seem like a friendly thing to do.

your presentation will resume in 5 seconds.

by the way, did you know that eBay’s developer program charges no license fees and actually pays you to create transactions on our platform?

I originally was ending this presentation

with yet one more story of platform wars,

but this one carried a grisly warning,

it didn’t feel right getting into it right before lunch.

so if you want to know more,

Wikipedia can tell you all about why the electric chair was originally invented

not to deal with criminals,

but to literally put the fear of death in consumers thinking about switching to a competitor’s platform.

“ don’t try alternating current, that’s what they kill people with!”

so instead, I’m going to share with you some wars you should be tracking.

you now have the tools to identify hot platform areas,

but here’s a few to get the discussion started:

the re-emergence of the browser wars: IE8 versus Chrome versus Firefox

I’m placing my bets on Firefox, as I doubt Microsoft’s vision, and Google’s stamina.

video-on-demand set-top boxes: Roku Netflix versus VuDu versus Xbox 360 versus PS3 versus every other VOD provider.

the Roku Netflix is the only one I’d consider under my Christmas tree, but whoever can deliver Hulu will be a strong favorite.

ultimately these devices will be the precursors to more generic set-top boxes able to receive all sorts of wonderful ad-supported content for free,

hey…. wait a second… hrm….

rich media platforms: Adobe AIR versus Microsoft Silverlight versus some killer Javascript libraries

I’m placing my bets on initial success with cross-platform Adobe Air, later superseded by Javascript programming

Adobe Air is aided by their penetration and developer base of Flash, but a more “open” platform will always win.

emerging “cloud” architecture: Google stack versus Amazon stack versus … ?

my spider sense edges towards Amazon Web Services, if only because I can clearly see their goal of industry dominance, and that’s more comforting than the disorganized intentions of Google.

and one last platform you should be keeping track of,

it’s a tricky one, no real competitors as of yet, but is showing a lot of promise

our eBay platform of course.

thank you for coming, please come visit us in our booth,

and happy coding.

the end.

developer.ebay.com

Slide #

Rolf Skyberg [email_address] http://rolfsky.com

Thank you to: Lawrence Lessig, for the presentation style Dick Hardt, for the inspiration the strongest person I know, my wife and you, (yes you), for coming

Rolf Skyberg developer. [email_address] http://rolfsky.com