Walled Gardens Versus Open Standards
In an ideal world, any true information appliance would be able to communicate with any other information appliance using open standard protocols and technologies, regardless of the maker of the software or the hardware. The communications aspects and all user interface elements would be designed together so that a user could switch seamlessly from one information appliance to another.
Some vendors are attempting to create "walled gardens" of closed proprietary content for information appliances, leveraging existing proprietary technologies. However, with the exception of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, these efforts have been less successful than predicted, due to the willingness of most vendors to work together within open standards frameworks, and the pre-existing widespread adoption of open standards such as GSM, IP, SMS and SMTP.
Read more about this topic: Information Appliance
Famous quotes containing the words walled, gardens, open and/or standards:
“Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The devout have laid out gardens in the desert.”
—Robert Duncan (b. 1919)
“I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience—it also marks the time, which is four o’clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.”
—Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816)
“With his brows knit, his mind made up, his will resolved and resistless, he advances, crashing his way through the host of weak, half-formed, dilettante opinions, honest and dishonest ways of thinking, with their standards raised, sentimentalities and conjectures, and tramples them all into dust. See how he prevails; you don’t even hear the groans of the wounded and dying.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)