Kingsley 2.0

Through my Social Media Firehose, I happened to stumble upon a conversation that Marc Canter (a futurist trapped in an entrepreneur) said he had had over salesforce.com. He mentioned the force.com platform’s “lock in”, a topic to which I have given a considerable amount of thought. My conclusion is this: you can either have an undifferentiated but open platform, or you can have a “locked in” platform that offers unique capabilities.

Most recent platforms - the force.com platform-as-a-service, the Facebook platform, Apple’s iPhone platform and Google’s App Engine are often called “closed platforms.” This is because the code you write to leverage these platforms cannot be run as-is on other, “open” platforms, such as LAMP (are there any other ?).

Vigilance against portability issues is definitely a laudable geek virtue. Unfortunately, the concern is at odds with that other, even more laudable geek virtue - innovation. If you choose a platform based on what it is uniquely good at, and you exploit what is uniquely good about that platform, then your code becomes hard to port to any other platform.

The trick for platform makers, I think, is to make the platform so that you can use standardized protocols to access the generalized parts of a platform and use specialized code and skills to access the unique parts of it. And I believe we do this well at salesforce.com - take a gander at the web services API.