The openness debate hits data portability
I had to stifle a laugh (or was it a yawn?) when reading "So Open It's Closed" on Elias Bizannes's Liako.biz blog. Bizannes is a leader in the data portability movement, which movement seems to be undergoing all the growing pains that open source once had (and still does, I suppose).
Consider Bizannes' plea for true and well-defined openness in data portability standards:
It's time some boundaries were set on what is effectively the brand of open. It's also time the term is defined, because quite frankly, it's lost all meaning now. I've listed some criteria - but what we really need is some consensus on what 'the' criteria for open should be.
Um, yeah. Good luck with that! See, we in open source have been through this (attribution/badgeware debate, anyone?), and we resolved it by throwing up our hands in despair and moving on.
Oddly enough, that was probably the right thing to do, as the only people that really care about such things are the vendors involved. Customers don't care, as a group of New York City-based CTOs told me recently. They just want software to work and vendors to focus on making them work, not making fetishes of whatever the fetish-du-jour may be.
Personally, I care a lot about data portability, for all the reasons implicit in Tim O'Reilly's contention that "the company with the most data wins." I want to be able to move my data to another team (though, in reality, I probably won't, for all the reasons that will make that team the winning one).
But while Bizannes and other data portability people will debate the topic of openness, the reality is that the debate has far less value than supposed. Ultimately, customers choose, and customers prove to be far less finicky about such things than vendors.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I have two points to raise in response to your post
1) the company with the most data wins.
Ok yes, it's a cliche that makes it sound like fact, but I call its bluff. What does too much data do? Additional compliance costs that having you waste time & money with regulators, linked with reputational costs that you can damage your brand because consumers are freaked out by what you hold of them and do with it. Data itself itsnt what gives you the competitive advantage: it's the interptetation of it to create derivate data or information. It's been said by people in the data analytics industry, that companies have all this data and they don't know what to do it with it. There aren't enough skilled people. As besides, the true benefit you want is access to the data: http://liako.biz/2008/11/you-dont-nor-need-to-own-your-data/
2) Consumers don't care about open.
Of course not. And currently, consumers don't care about data portability because we haven't made any effort to raise awareness yet. Once we hit a few miletstones, we will be ready to communicate to the mass market about what we think, and it's going to be about what our opinion are about websites and how they comply with our vision. The fact is, we care because we think we should care, as people could profit in an area they shouldn't be and it's open to abuse. Most consumers don't even know what an Open Standard is, and not even what Open Source unless they read Wikinomics. The people that connect with the mainstream, and translate the technical to how it benefits them in a non-technical way, will put them in a position so that in an indirect way, will make consumers care.