Model-View-Controller as Business Pattern

I attended the AT&T Developer Summit (twitter feed) and the Consumer Electronics Show (twitter feed) this week.  An AT&T panelist (Scott Williams) observed that their business has changed from being a phone company to being a network and is changing again to become a software company.

The success of Twitter (under-rated in my opinion) and many other services has much more do with their APIs and an open, encouraging attitude toward end-user innovation (article by Steven Johnson from TIME).  If you think about it, there are then three types of “things” in the world:  devices that create, consume, transform, present data; services that transact, analyze, move, provide access to data; and, of course, the data itself.  What Mr. Williams’ comment means to me is that AT&T has gone through an exercise in unbundling itself and is now offering a variety of services to access the data that AT&T stores.

Not long ago this kind of unbundling would have been considered very dangerous.  But it does have a precedent in software design.  This decomposition should be very familiar as a model-view-controller architecture.

It occurred to me at CES that businesses could then be classified as to the degree to which they fit into a world where this marchitecture is commonplace.  That is, does XYZ’s ABC offering provide data, intelligence, connectivity, or access to them?  Or is the ABC offering an “all-in-one” system that can never be decoupled?

I’ll submit that offerings that do not fit into this model are fundamentally flawed and their market future limited.  Such an offering limits end-user innovation and cannot harness the broader power of the marketplace.  Offerings that to comply with this type of architecture will enjoy very long lives and far reaching applicability.  Consider how many Google Maps applications you’ve seen.

Let’s look at some examples:

Garmin makes excellent devices that create, consume, and present data.  That data is provided by Navteq and is accessed over M2M services from AT&T.  But none of the three are exclusively dependent on the others!  Garmin could access other map data and configure their devices to use other networks.  Likewise, Navteq’s data is also presented in other “devices” like MapQuest’s website.

Prior to Howard Stern’s renewal with SiriusXM, a subscriber was required to purchase a specific device (from SiriusXM) which only accesses data (that only originates from SiriusXM) over SiriusXM’s exclusive satellite network.  This is a very limiting model.  Note that now, SiriusXM have opened this up to offer all of their programming over the their streaming service over the internet.  This places them solidly in the role of a data provider while allowing for service and device independence.

Okay, I may have made my examples a bit simplistic to illustrate the idea, but I think this is a very powerful razor to filter business opportunities and develop strategic plans.  A review of the accessibility of an offering’s data–that is, what’s the API–would likely review market opportunities or vulnerabilities.

Finally, we shouldn’t forget to ensure that offerings are complete in the first use.  In many cases this may necessitate creation of multiple components that work in concert to create a complete offering.  However, replacement of the data, service, and device components should be anticipated eagerly as that is where the core offering will rise and you can focus on developing your strengths.

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