Closed Book: The Problem with Kindle

Amazon's new electronic book, Kindle, addresses many of the mistakes made by previous entries in this highly unsuccessful market. Better display. Low-priced titles. Built-in networking.

Too bad Amazon forgot the key ingredient to technology platform success: openness. David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, opines that open systems are almost always the market winners over the long term. An open system allows developers and users to create services and applications for your product that you never envisioned, giving it even more value.

Is your product susceptible to competition from an open provider? Weinberger says the answer may be yes if:

The benefit your product delivers is broad and of cultural significance.
The quality of what your product delivers is subjective.
The benefit delivered by your product naturally wants to be a commodity.
Your product could be considered a platform.
(Kindle image by b d solis, CC 2.0)

Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

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