Who is Farhan Lalji?

Umair’s been spending quite a bit of time talking about good and evil, open and closed, Microsoft and Yahoo, and Facebook and Google. A very basic synopsis would be that open is good, Microsoft, and increasingly Facebook, have bad DNA and this will prevent them from sustaining success in the long run. Whereas Google has being good in it’s DNA and this will enable them to succeed in the long run. It’s a pretty smart analysis and I think its pretty spot on.

However, one company that has kept its doors closed and managed to succeed is Apple. iTunes has to be the most closed bit of software I know. And DRM is just plain evil, very evil. But yet Apple kills in this market and is showing no signs of letting up.

So my theory is that design can trump good and evil in the short term. If you ensure that users have a great experience, and that it’s simple, efficient and effective users and the community in general will overlook the fact that it’s closed, proprietary and evil - how else would you explain DRM? The iPhone is another example of closed and well designed but yet super successful. The fact that Apple was bricking unlocked phones is another great example of evil but well designed.

Is this sustainable? I don’t believe so. I believe if someone comes up with a really useful, easy, super smooth system that has a wide variety of content and is good, open, basically DRM free, then iTunes could go down. And if someone (RIM/Nokia I’m looking at you) comes up with a phone that meets the standards Apple has set for usability for browsing and interacting online on your handheld device and is open as well, well then Apple could go down there too. It’s not easy, because Apple’s set the design bar so high, but it’s not impossible.