How much platform competition is too much competition? For example, what is the optimal number of mobile operating systems or video game consoles that will spur competition and innovation in those respective sectors?

It is an interesting business question, but it also has some policy implications since some might propose laws or regulations to remedy a perceived lack of platform competition in various sectors. After all, many people would answer the above question by saying that there is never such a thing as too much competition. The more platforms the better. But there can be costs associated with too much competition. Let's consider those two case studies mentioned above: mobile operating systems or video game consoles.

Mobile Operating Systems
As my colleague Berin Szoka has pointed out, we are witnessing the rapid proliferation of mobile operating systems, especially on the open source front. So, we've got Apple's iPhone platform, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Symbian, Google's Android, the LiMo platform, and OpenMoko.

One one hand, all this platform competition sounds great. But as Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal's "Business Tech Blog" points out in a piece today:

Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessant ranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an "1984 kind of total control."

Hmmm, let's see... Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you'd think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.

OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.

And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I've got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone!

Very useful chart over on the Verizon policy blog put together by Link Hoewing and Larry Plumb. Link uses it illustrate the changes we have seen over the past three decades in terms of Internet access platforms and speeds. It's too small to read here, so make sure to go there to see it more clearly and also see Link's interesting discussion.

Faithful readers will recall that, several months ago, I penned a 7-part "Media Metrics" series that took a hard look at the health of the media marketplace. Today, the Progress & Freedom Foundation is releasing a greatly expanded version of these essays that I have put together with my PFF colleague Grant Eskelsen. In this 100-page special report, "Media Metrics: The True State of the Modern Media Marketplace," we begin by noting that heated debates about the state of the media marketplace continue to rage in Washington, and opinions seem to range from grim to outright apocalyptic. As we note on pg. 1:

Many people--including a large number of legislators and regulators--argue that America's media marketplace is in a miserable state. Some claim that citizens lack choice in media outlets and that options are just as scarce as ever. Others believe that media "localism" is dead or that many groups or niches go underserved because of a lack of true "diversity" in media. Others argue that the market is hopelessly over-concentrated in the hands of a few evil media barons who are hell-bent on force-feeding us corporate propaganda. And still others say that the quality of news and entertainment in our society has deteriorated because of a combination of all of the above. It all sounds quite troubling, but is any of it true?

After taking an objective look at the true state of America's media marketplace, we conclude that such pessimism is unwarranted. Indeed, a careful review of the facts reveals that---contrary to what those media critics suggest---we have more media choice, more media competition, and more media diversity than ever before. Indeed, to the extent there was ever a "golden age" of media in America, we are living in it today. The media sky has never been brighter and it is getting brighter with each passing year.

Beyond what Jim Harper already said about it, I was searching for the right words to express how silly I find the far-fetched rhetorical B.S. being flung about to describe this quixotic new "Broadband for Everyone" crusade. And then I found this great little comment by Steve Boriss over at The Future of News blog. He really nails the utopian silliness that animates this movement in his essay, "Net neutrality proponents' ideals as contradictory as French Revolution's":

Government regulation always begins with a call from those who claim they are only trying to right some hard-to-argue-against wrongs, but whose consequences are poorly thought out. Today we learn of a new such party, InternetForEveryone.org, which has a mission so contradictory that it almost makes my head explode. Their ideals call to mind the French Revolutionists, who called for "liberty, equality, and fraternity," not realizing that liberty and equality are incompatible -- that making people equal requires liberty-suppressing force. The new group calls for guaranteed high speed Internet access for everyone (a basic right of all Americans, they say), lower usage prices, more competition, and more innovation. Tell me, if we force Internet providers to give access to everyone, then force them to charge less than the marketplace tells them they should, where will the money come from for innovation? And what would happen to the potential profits that might entice others to join in the competition? Guess it will have to come from taxpayers and that government will have to run the show. InternetForEveryone.org claims to be neutral on the net, but it is surely not neutral on government -- they want a lot more of it.

Exactly. It's 'something-for-nothing' economics meets utopian egalitarianism as applied to broadband. But, as Steve notes, there is no free lunch. Every time I debate one of the people or groups involved in this movement, I always ask questions like: What about incentives to invest and innovate? What role do they play in your model? Where is the risk capital going to come from to build these high-fixed cost networks going forward? How will those networks be upgraded over time? And so on.

And they never have any good answers. To the extent they have any answers at all, it always seems to come back to the idea of treating broadband networks like a lazy public utility. You know, because we've had so much success with those! And yet, this crowd seems wants to paint a revisionist history of public utilities and try to convince us that we are just ONE MORE muni fiber or muni wi-fi experiment away from getting it right! Uh-huh, sure we are. Meanwhile, taxpayers are bailing out those past failed experiments all over America right now.

The fundamental problem with the entire Net neutrality movement can be summarized as follows: They obsess about investment and innovation at the margin of networks but spend little time thinking about the preconditions for serious innovation and investment at the core of networks. Government micro-management ain't ever going to get us where we need to be in that regard.

MIT's Technology Review has a great review of a new biography of Georges Doriot (Wikipedia) by Businessweek Editor Spencer E. Ante entitled, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital. Born in France, Doriot fought in World War I, then studied at Harvard Business School, served as director of the U.S. military's Military Planning Division during World War II as a brigadier general, and in 1946 launched American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) as the first publicly owned venture capital firm.

Doriot's legacy looms large today, even if his name is new to most:

Contemporaneously with ARD's watershed investment in [Digital Equipment Corporation], others began walking the trails Doriot had blazed: Arthur Rock (a student of Doriot's in the Harvard class of 1951) backed the departure of the "Traitorous Eight" from Shockley Semiconductor to form ­Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then funded ­Robert Noyce and ­Gordon Moore when they left ­Fairchild to found Intel; ­Laurance ­Rockefeller formed ­Venrock, which has since backed more than 400 companies, including Intel and Apple; Don ­Valentine formed Sequoia Capital, which would invest in Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google, and YouTube.

Doriot himself would likely have felt at home among today's embattled and outnumbered regulation-skeptics in the technology policy community:

he opposed both the dirigiste political economy of his native France and the tax hikes and anticompetitive laws enacted in the United States under the New Deal. Such regulations, he maintained, arrogated to bureaucrats the function of the markets; their worst feature was that they let government lend money to failing businesses. Ante notes that a former colleague of Doriot's, James F. Morgan, recalled him as "the most schizophrenic Frenchman I've ever met"--devoted to his original land's wine, cuisine, and language even as "the French capacity to make very simple things complicated drove him nuts."

Over at the New York Times Bits blog, Eric Taub is wondering who is winning the (video game) console wars. But the more interesting question is: How is it that we been lucky enough to have sustained, vigorous competition among three major platform developers for so long?

Honestly, I never understood how there was enough room for 3 competing consoles in the video game market. I figured that if consumers didn't do in one of the platforms first that game developers would sink one of them in the name of simplifying development and minimizing costs. In fact, last October, an EA executive called for a "single, open platform" for developers to replace the competing console model. It would be interesting to see how a single platform impacted game development, but I think most of us find real benefits from having competing consoles at our disposal.

For example, I'm lucky enough to own both an XBox 360 and a Sony PS3, and although most of the games I play are available on both, each system has its own advantages and keeps the other one on its toes. Specifically, the Xbox offers an outstanding online marketplace with tons of great downloadable content, including HD movies and more TV shows than I can count. Sony, by contrast, is struggling to catch up to Microsoft's online offerings, but the PS3 is an outstanding media player in its own right. Most electronics and home theater magazines agree that the PS3 is still the best Blu-Ray player on the market today. And, although I don't have a Nintendo Wii, I think we can all appreciate the innovative controller that Nintendo brought to the market and the way it has injected an entirely new element into the home console wars. Finally, I haven't even mentioned the unique advantages that the PC platform offers gamers who are into simulators or more intense online, interactive gameplay than what consoles offer.

In sum, video game console competition is playing out quite nicely, even though I still find it hard to understand how all 3 systems (4 if you include the PC market) continue to co-exist.

There are a number of big questions facing the country as we approach an election of great consequence this fall. The whiff of "change" is in the air, after all. One of the very biggest questions is whether, in the face of dramatic changes in the global economy, the U.S. will turn towards comfortable security and "equality" or whether it will recommit to the strategy that put us at the top of the world -- entrepreneurial capitalism.

Michael Malone today has a nice essay on entrepreneurship:

We still have companies and corporations, but now they are virtualized, with online work teams handing off assignments to each other 24/7 around the world. Men and women go to work, but the office is increasingly likely to be in the den. In 2005, an Intel survey of its employees found that nearly 20% of its professionals had never met their boss face-to-face. Half of them never expected to. Last summer, when the Media X institute at Stanford extended that survey to IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft and Cisco, the percentages turned out to be even greater.

Newspapers are dying, networks are dying, and if teenage boys playing GTA 4 and World of Warcraft have any say about it, so is television. More than 200 million people now belong to just two social networks: MySpace and Facebook. And there are more than 80 million videos on YouTube, all put there by the same individual initiative.

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

I agree that the vector of our economy is toward more entrepreneurship. But it is by no means a sure thing that this vector will be sustained. Crucial decisions on free trade, health care, immigration, energy production and usage, Internet regulation, and taxes, among others, will help determine whether entrepreneurs can afford to strike out on their own. Whether the human and financial capital crucial to innovation will continue to flow to the U.S. Whether our sense of risk is tipped toward the ever-brighter future or whether, believing our best days are behind, we decide to draw down on past innovations and accumulated wealth.

Entrepreneurship is always a bit scary. Malone notes that our economy is likely to become even more dynamic. And thus disorienting.

The economy will be much more volatile and much more competitive. In the continuous fervor to create new institutions, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain old ones. New political parties, new social groupings, thousands of new manias and movements and millions of new companies will pop up over the next few decades. Large corporations that don't figure out how to combine permanence with perpetual change will be swept away.

This higher level of anarchy will be exciting, but it will also sometimes be very painful. Entire industries will die almost overnight, laying off thousands, while others will just as suddenly appear, hungry for employees. Continuity and predictability will become the rarest of commodities. And if the entrepreneurial personality honors smart failures, by the same token it has little pity for weakness. That fraction of Americans – 10%, 20% – who still dream of the gold watch or the 30-year pin will suffer the most . . . and unless their needs are somehow met as well, they will remain a perpetually open wound in our society.

This is the trick. The security within our grasp is almost always more appealing than the unknown. For a rich nation like the U.S., this temptation toward known comforts will be even greater than for the poor nation with nothing to lose.

So, as we struggle to keep our bearings in this volatile world of technology and globalization, we should all keep Einstein's simple maxim in mind:

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

The best way to navigate the bumps, curves, and valleys of the global economy is not to stop or slow way down but to keep moving.

Randall Stross, a Silicon Valley-based technology author, has penned an excellent essay for the New York Times making an argument that many of us here have made in the past: "The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits." That is, tech giants can rise very quickly and attain something approaching market dominance thanks to the power of bandwagon effects and the "winner-takes-all" economics that characterize digital markets in the short-term. But that dominance, Stross rightly argues, is difficult to maintain over the long haul because technology and markets evolve rapidly and new players displace old ones. Mr. Stross notes that IBM is a classic example, but Microsoft is experiencing a similar fate:

two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that he won’t succeed. Not because of personal failings, but because Mother Nature simply won’t permit it.

Well, I actually didn't exactly get a chance to say quite enough for this to qualify as much of a "debate," but I was brought in roughly a half hour into this WBUR (Boston NPR affiliate) radio show featuring Jonathan Zittrain, author of the recently released: The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. Jonathan was kind enough to suggest to the producers that I might make a good respondent to push back a bit in opposition to the thesis set forth in his new book.

Jonathan starts about 6 minutes into the show and they bring me in around 29 minutes in. Although I only got about 10 minutes to push back, I thought the show's host Tom Ashbrook did an excellent job raising many of the same questions I do in my 3-part review (Part 1, 2, 3) of Jonathan's provocative book.

In the show, I stress the same basic points I made in those reviews: (1) he seems to be over-stating things quite a bit in saying that the old "generative" Internet is "dying"; and in doing so, (2) he creates a false choice of possible futures from which we must choose. What I mean by false choice is that Jonathan doesn’t seem to believe a hybrid future is possible or desirable. I see no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds–-a world full of plenty of tethered appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness.

If you're interested, listen in.