For each of 12 Mondays from November through January I am summarizing one of my original ideas.
7. Participatory design is a difficult concept to explain. It is not necessarily openness or transparency. It is rather the opposite of proprietary.
In my books and articles and lectures I have cited many examples. The first is the RCA 45 record player which was designed to be proprietary in operation and content. This is contrasted with the Philips tape cassette, which was openly licensed to everyone at a low cost. RCA was stuck with the teenybopper record market, very small. Philips got 1/3 of the gigantic participatory tape market that they created.
Polaroid got a teeny specialized market. 35mm film from Kodak and others fit in every camera with every type of lens and was the dominant film. RCA failed again with its proprietary video disk and proprietary content.
Apple has always been proprietary and rarely got 2% of the global PC market. In contrast, the apps on the iPhone were a stunning success because they were participatory in nature. The Android apps turned out to be even more participatory and more successful.
The lesson never changes. Go proprietary and you will have a smaller market than the participatory market will generate. The reason is simple: thousands of minds and innovators who work in the participatory mode can be more in touch with the market than dozens who work on the proprietary level.