What would you do if you could go back in time? Way, way, way back to the days when Nokia and Symbian ruled the mobile phone world? Would you have known that one day, you could develop Instagram?
Amazingly, we have a chance to do it over again. The energy industry is digitizing, and it’ll go from hardware to platforms. (Read more about it here.)
When it does, those platforms will have to be open source, because energy is just too big an industry. With phones, Apple could create a non-open source iOS platform because it could put together a complete phone, and you could buy a complete phone from Apple. With energy, though, no vendor is big enough to put everything together, from the electric grid to local renewables and batteries to the HVAC and lighting inside your building. No customer or corporate entity could own all these pieces either.
So we’ll always have a mix of manufacturers and service providers that communicate through open protocols, and that is the foundation of open platforms and open source.