In The Origin of Wealth, Beinhocker explores computer simulations of the prisoner’s dilemma in a market ecology which demonstrated that even the best-of-breed “tit-for-tat” solution to the dilemma is not consistently successful in the context of an ecology versus a one-on-one relationship. Excessively open environments are vulnerable to hard-nosed closed ones and the reverse is also true.

I think we are seeing some of this kind of open versus closed strategy competition playing out in the social-networking platform arena. Walled gardens are always vulnerable to open strategies however once the field is open then a new ecosystem emerges to support a variety of smaller closed strategies. And so it goes.

The key is to have a healthy ecosystem with sufficient openness to support innovation and growth. Certainly, no all open strategies are good. Look at OpenOffice. Without a simple, transparent API (like Firefox for example) there is little scope for innovation when it take 8 hours to compile a single change in OpenOffice code. They are technically open but closed in practice. Contrast with Skype which is technically closed but simple, ubiquitous, useful, and sufficiently integrable into any system.

Having said all that, I think that is the story of how things are but perhaps not how they have to be in the future. No doubt I am just having a utopian moment but just perhaps as we begin to examine our collective responsibility for each other and for the planet, we might move in general to less zero-sum oriented approaches.