Portability

Giving us the power to choose where we run our software.

Log Entries

Portability is a very underrated quality. Typically we have a few set of tools that help us get on with our life: maybe that is a GPS, a messaging platform, a design tool et.c.

When the tool we use are only available on one platform, then we are coerced to use only that platform, ceding more power to that one platform. When we have software that is portable, we can leave the platform and use something else. It therefore empowers the user, giving them a voice.

Typically portability and compatibility is on the lowest of the totem pole in priorities of a company, that is unless there are forces that make them need to consider it.

One force that makes a company consider it is regulation and standards. These forces can make companies act ethically but also force them to follow standards that make the tools portable and interoperable. It is not purely a negative for companies, as they then tend to be able to leverage the tooling that has been made around that standards, but they do lose control. There is an interesting phenomena there were adding some restrictions to what we can do collectively, allows us more choice and freedom in other ways.

Another force is market forces, when there is a big enough market for software on different platforms, companies are forced to make it interoperable. We see this with the web, where the dominance of Internet Explorer made it so that companies stopped targeting other browsers, outright banning their use. By clawing back control through using alternatives, it allowed users of other operating systems to also use the web, and forced developers to account for more than one browser. It also forced internet explorer to start playing nice, and not employ anti-competitive behavior, as they could no longer break the established standards.

It might be worth asking ourselves when we choose a piece of software how portable it is, and how much does it lock us into one vendor, or one way of doing things. Not just the software itself, but also the data it generates.

- Marc