Companies like Apple and Microsoft are starting to create a web of products that are all designed to work really well with each other. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Apple’s iLife software package. It includes a number of applications like a photo organizer and a movie maker. Another example, though, is Windows, Windows Home Server, Windows Media Center, and the Zune. In fact, you could really put almost every product Apple makes into one “web.” As I said before, all the products in each web are designed to be perfectly integrated into each other. There may be some cross-compatibility, but the products  are “best” together.

What these “webs” mean is that you can buy into the “Apple experience” or the “Microsoft experience.” The question in my mind was, what is the “open-source experience.” The problem, if you call it a problem, is that there is no one company or group to create an Apple or Microsoft-like set of products. It just doesn’t work that way. That’s OK. These super integrated product sets are the wrong way of doing things, anyway.

As an example, lets take two of Apple’s products: Mail and iCal. In a perfect world, there are a number of things Mail and iCal, or any E-Mail program and any calender program, should be able to do together. For example, you might get an e-mail that had a date for some event and want to add that event to your calender. Apple’s solution (which they may have already done – I just don’t know) would be to make it so that if you use Mail you can send event details to iCal. If you did this on the Linux side, though, what e-mail client and what calender program would you choose? That is where the right way comes in.

Instead of making program X and program Y talk to each other, why not create an open protocol for any application of type X to talk to any other application of type Y. If these sorts of protocols were adopted, it would solve the problem of the best applications, presumably from different companies, not working as well together as all the applications from one company. All you would have to do is find the best application for your needs and you would know that it will work with all your other applications. This should be the “open-source experience.”

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