Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The network effect occurs when the value of some technology depends not
Denition: network effect
only on its intrinsic capabilities, but also on the number of other people who have
adopted that technology. Application and hardware designers spend their efforts
on those operating system platforms with the most users, while users favor those
operating systems with the best applications or the cheapest hardware. If this
sounds circular, it is! More users imply more applications and cheaper hardware;
more applications and cheaper hardware imply more users, in a virtuous cycle.
Consider how you might design an operating system to take advantage of
the network effect, or at least to avoid being crushed by it. An obvious step
would be designing the system to make it easy to accommodate new hardware,
and to make it easy for applications to be ported across different versions of the
same operating system.
A more subtle issue is the choice of whether the operating system program-
ming interface (API), or the operating system source code itself, is open or
proprietary.
A proprietary system is one under the control of a single com-
Denition: proprietary
pany, so it can be changed at any time by its provider to meet the needs of
its customers. An open system is one where the system's source code is public,
Denition: open system
allowing anyone the ability to inspect the code and change it. Often, an open
system will have an API that can only be changed with the agreement of a public
standards body. Adherence to standards provides assurance to the application
developer that the API will not be changed except by general agreement; on the
other hand, standards bodies can make it dicult to quickly add new, desired
features.
Neither open systems nor proprietary ones are obviously better for widespread
adoption. Windows 7 and MacOS are examples of proprietary operating sys-
tems; Linux is an example of an open operating system. All three are widely
used! Open systems are easier to adapt to a wide variety of hardware platforms,
but risk fragmentation, impairing the network effect. Purveyors of proprietary
operating systems argue that their systems are more reliable and better adapted
to the needs of their customers. Interoperability problems are reduced if both
the hardware and software are controlled by the same company, but limiting an
operating system to one hardware platform impairs the network effect.
Making it easy to port applications from existing systems to a new operating
system can help a new system become established, and conversely, designing
an operating system API to make it dicult to port applications away from
the operating system can help prevent competition from becoming established.
Thus, there are often commercial pressures for operating system interfaces to
become idiosyncratic. Throughout this topic, we will discuss operating systems
issues at a conceptual level, but it is important to realize that the details will
vary quite a bit for any specific operating system, due to important, but also
somewhat chaotic, commercial interests.