Open Google

Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President at Google, wrote a very interesting email about the value of openness on the web and sent the email to Google's employees. He recommends Googlers to use open standards, to open source software, to make it easy to export data from Google's services and to fight for an open Internet.

Open systems are (...) competitive and far more dynamic. In an open system, a competitive advantage doesn't derive from locking in customers, but rather from understanding the fast-moving system better than anyone else and using that knowledge to generate better, more innovative products. (...)

We use tens of millions of lines of open source code to run our products. We also give back: we are the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source, with four projects (Chrome, Android, Chrome OS, and Google Web Toolkit) of over a million lines of code each. (...)

The ability to switch is critical, so instead of building walls around your product, build bridges. (...)

We believe in the power of technology to deliver information. We believe in the power of information to do good. We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get. Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

It's interesting to notice that many of the products released by Google in the past 2 years are open platforms (Android, Chrome), proposals for open standards (o3d , OpenSocial, Google Wave Protocol) and not just Google services. Google actually invests in a better web.

"If you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic. Rather it's good business, since an open Internet creates a steady stream of innovations that attracts users and usage and grows the entire industry," explains Jonathan Rosenberg.