 So I am Ross Dawson, futurist, together with Gerd Leonard, who's visiting Sydney at the moment, also a futurist, and in a series of conversations today talking about closed versus open systems and which one will prevail. So Gerd, closed versus open, which side are you on? Semi open. No, just kidding. I get a lot of questions from my clients because basically as we're looking at so-called social media and Facebook and so on, a lot of my clients are saying like, do we really need to do this to like open up to the outside world and conversations with our customers? And do we really need this? Because of course it's, as Marshall McLuhan has already said, the global village is not a quiet place, right? It's actually a noisy place and it can be rather confusing. So if you're a big brand or a car manufacturer or a broadcaster, so do you really want people to come and talk to you about what you should be doing and how to innovate and how to contribute? I mean this is a big, big issue. I think basically what we're seeing happening is that open systems are by and large faster, more viral, have more innovation and are more fun for people to work in than closed organizations. The only case I can really think of a really closed ecosystem working is Apple, which you know, I love Apple products, but they're of course infamous for being run by a benevolent dictator. So the whole paradigm of being open, I think, is the question of Google versus Apple or say ... Well, Google is not necessarily as open as they like to present to. Yes, it's common on that. Well, I mean I think back ages ago, you know, I've said that the future is towards open systems. There is I think a gradual, long and gradual trend towards open systems, which it isn't always linear. And I guess over time, looking at the last decade, I've actually, it hasn't gone as open as I would have expected. We've had an extraordinary shift to open, particularly in terms of transparency, and that's a massive trend. We've had a big trend to openness in platforms. So in terms of open source and the growth of open source, including the corporate environment, clearly in mobile operating systems now with Android. But there's still, in terms of the ecosystems, which it really develops, there still is a battle between ecosystems in a way there is this balance between open and closed, where you want to be open within a space but have boundaries around that and to compete with other ecosystems. And I think that's what we are beginning to see. So arguably, you know, Android has been a very open, in some ways too open and you get fragmentation of the operating system and so on. But it still creates these two-point closed systems. So where the Android app store is one closed system, then the iTunes app store is another closed system. And these are, you know, within open spaces, you then ultimately have boundaries themselves. They are closed. Well, I think it's not a black or white question. Clearly, the very few things, of course, are black and white questions. But open and closed, I think they're working in conjunction. I sometimes say you should be open AMAP as much as possible because there are situations where if it's completely open and available to everyone and with everyone, where it becomes rather impractical or slow or down with quality control issues and so on and so on. So however, in general, I think that what we're seeing is that if people are involved in, for example, making a new product or sharing it or forwarding it like YouTube type scenario, I mean, clearly Twitter beats CNN in many ways now. Not to say that CNN is closed. It's not, right? It's using Twitter, but the power of Twitter is the chaotic open nature of it. Yes. And that means I need other professionals to filter it, which is closed. Right? So basically, I think it's always going to be a combination of the two. But in reality is the way that the world is connecting and interconnecting with each other, which means that we'll probably have more need for open interfaces and APIs. You know, APIs alone have been given a huge boost of value to the internet economy. Otherwise, you wouldn't have Google Maps, you know. But I think that that's one of the biggest single turning points, I think, in the shape of the internet was the fact that Google provided open APIs to maps and a whole bunch of other things. And that provided momentum to basically where it's standard for almost any app to have APIs. So I think one of the issues is the pace of shift to openness. You can't believe that we are shifting to open standards or open platforms in a particular environment, though that doesn't necessarily mean that strategically you need to immediately become open. No, it's kind of the same. We will, we understand that that's where it's going, but there still can be value to be gained if you're looking from purely commercial perspectives as opposed to idealistic ones as to the pace to be able to at which you open out from a closed system. And I think one of the very interesting things is around openness in social networks. We've seen Facebook become a lot more open than it was, basically through social pressure, not so much through competitiveness. Now Google+, with its launch, does allow immediately complete export of your social network data. And that starts to, again, change the competitive landscape. It's not as if people will immediately switch from Facebook to Google+, because it has an export function and Facebook doesn't. Yet it changes the overall landscape, in particular in terms of the choices people make over time and where they keep the bulk of their social profile. I think openness, of course, is becoming a huge asset, but it can also become maybe not a liability, but an encumbrance in some ways as you're dealing with the process of being open, but for example, if you're looking at rights like music rights or broadcast rights, film rights, and so on, these systems are very close, right? And that's a real hindrance to the commerce system, right? And that's clearly, in this case, it's quite clear that we must open this up and we must create open licensing platforms like we have in broadcasting. You know, clear regulations, standards, you know, there's some places where if we don't open up, it's going to crash, because basically it means that everybody who's trying to use it is not legal as a consequence of it not being open, right? And there's other places, for example, with banking and security, where a certain kind of openness would not be a good thing because it would be too easy to crack, right? I mean, so we're not, I mean, I wouldn't be proposing to have WikiLeaks for banking or, you know, for my personal data. But at the same time, I think some of the things that we've seen in this process is good to have transparency, which generates honesty or generates a general feeling of trust. And that's what it's all about. And if you need some control to have trust, then maybe that's also a good thing, right? But I think as far as rights, for example, goes, we must have open platforms for rights licensing, which is a crucial impediment right now for commerce. Yeah, yeah. And a part of that related to that is the creative commons or multiple or more, I suppose, finely tuned ways of being able to license content, which whereas opposed to basically, you know, this, I should say, the black and white are closed and open and getting more subtleties in how we can license content and generate revenue from that, I think is very important. Yeah, so I think to summarize, we could say that I think open as much as possible is probably a good mantra as far as operating things are concerned. It's probably not a good idea to just say, let's open up everything and it's all right there. You know, that would be tough to execute on. But there's unfortunately no recipe for this. Yeah, and as we've discussed, every strategy is unique. So there is no right or wrong in terms of, you know, the openness or close, just recognizing that there is a fundamental drift to openness. So that's a snapshot of things, thoughts around open and closed systems and strategies. So for more, you can go to rossdorsen.com for information about myself. And mediafuturists.com and of course, Twitter, G Leonhard. But if you want to get to my open stuff on the web, which is all available for free, well, let's just put in GERG-ERD and free PDF and you can download all of my books. And I'm open to your donations as well, by the way, if you want to do that later. But anyway, what's on YouTube? Rossdorsen and Gerd Leonhard did lots of lots of videos on YouTube, including this one, hopefully, and thanks for listening.