{"id":344,"date":"2008-01-08T22:30:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-08T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/08\/platform-power\/"},"modified":"2023-04-20T15:18:03","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T09:48:03","slug":"platform-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/2008\/01\/platform-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Platform Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a big believer in going against the grain… standing out in a crowd… rocking the boat… being “different”… In fact, this entire blog <\/em>has been dedicated to writing about the “other” point of view!\u00a0 Lately, however, I have become increasingly aware of the benefits of staying with<\/em> the crowd, at least where Technology is concerned.<\/p>\n

Allow me to explain:\u00a0 Buy a not-so-popular mobile phone, and you find yourself stranded in situations when you need a charger and no one else can lend you one.\u00a0 Sign up for an obscure email service and your friends and family will find it difficult to remember your email address.\u00a0 Got a no-name MP3\/MP4 player?\u00a0 I’m not sure if it will read your music files without needing conversion!<\/p>\n

Many of us must have dealt with some or the other version of the above.\u00a0 The bottom-line is that there is comfort in numbers.\u00a0 Not to mention, the “Network Effect<\/em>” that kicks in!<\/p>\n

It’s not a problem that plagues individuals, alone.\u00a0 Apple has historically lost the “PC” war on account of not making its hardware and OS “open” to developers.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 Microsoft came and swept the desktop world, with millions of small and big developers writing applications for a platform they could easily work with.\u00a0 Sony lost the video-cassette battle to the VHS standard.\u00a0 As a result, its superior Betacam format was restricted to a niche place in the industry.\u00a0 Most recently, a fierce war is being fought over DVD standards with entertainment majors like Sony and Toshiba on opposite sides of the BluRay and HD bandwagons.\u00a0 In each such case, there is major money to be made by the organization that backs the right horse… its survival<\/em> may just depend on that decision.<\/p>\n

For an individual like myself, this “platform power” yields some very powerful and exciting benefits.<\/p>\n

A good example is the iconic iPod which has now spawned a whole world of related technologies (e.g. podcasting?) because of its sheer popularity.\u00a0\u00a0Some of the gadgets I own, or services I subscribe to, are no different.<\/p>\n

The bluetooth device I own (Jabra BT250) has worked seamlessly with the last six mobile phones I purchased.\u00a0 The MP3 player in my car (iPod Nano) is loaded with podcasts from Harvard Business School and the NY Times TechTalk.\u00a0 My blogging service (WordPress) sports widgets that integrate beautifully with my other subscriptions from industry-standards like Feedburner. \u00a0 And, it doesn’t stop there… Even my state-of-the-art Digital SLR (Nikon D40<\/a>) is designed to work with any Nikkor lens manufactured by Nikon since the 1970s!!!<\/p>\n

Once you begin reaping the benefits of the “platform”, it doesn’t make sense going back, does it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a big believer in going against the grain… standing out in a crowd… rocking the boat… being “different”… In fact, this entire blog<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1,20],"tags":[8,26,11],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-personal","tag-photography","tag-resources","tag-technology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4157,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions\/4157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}