We need open data exchange protocols with closed data exchange transmissions
What we really need to get away from this and to allow businesses the flexibility they need – eliminating the lock-in – is industry to agree to use open data exchange protocols. The protocols themselves need to be open to allow cloud services in a well-designed system to be modular and subsitutable / pluggable. Unfortunately, this is something very few companies want to do: it means that their customers could switch to another provider more easily.
Perhaps it is time for competitors – particularly smaller field players – to start to work together, in the realization that redundency could actually be a selling point, as should one competitor's services fail, the customer is not left stranded without any business continuity backup plan?
/via +Kaj Sotala
GameSpy shutting down all hosted services
Potentially hundreds of online titles will stop working May 31 as tech outfit pulls the plug
+Matt Lambert I wish the cloud was that simple too. But there are several factors pushing decisionmakers to go to cloud, not just 'I want to send my contact a message'. But maybe there's a win-win message hiding in the many decision factors that could help push interoperability a bit faster?
It reminds me of when the SMS industry operators allowed people to send messages 'cross network' in 1999 – at that point the service exploded. A common standard served to enlarge the industry as a whole…
We can decentralize and standardize this.
As usual xkcd says it best.
https://xkcd.com/927/
There are open standards for exchanging data, but everyone just does whatever they feel like. That is until their system fails.
As an aside, I have found it consistently surprising how difficult it has been to get the companies I work with to take this class of problem seriously. None of them have been bitten by it… yet. Time will tell.