What Will It Take to Change the Ecosystem?

At the risk of dating myself, I was there before there was an Internet, but I remember all the arguments.

The guys from the phone companies wanted to make the rules. "Okay, fine, if we're going to have data on networks, we're going to have ATM switches because it's got to be circuit switched — that's the way robust networks work. This packet switching stuff will never work. You can't send voice over IP packets. They're too vague, the latency's too high. It'll never work."

At the time, we were just building software and we said, "Well why don't we try to send voice over IP networks and…it seems to work pretty good!"

For the phone companies their resistance was all about their survival. Or that's how they viewed it — but that really wasn't the case. It turned out that they were protecting a business model that was about to be overwhelmed by a new wave of technology. So now they have a new business model which is even better.

We think it would be good for the diabetes community and device manufacturers if they embraced an open architecture. They already see the value in how open data can help with fitness, let's work with them to bring that openness to their diabetes data.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School Professor and authority on disruptive innovation, makes the case that proprietary system architectures are giving way to open system architectures. It may take a while, but Android is going to win out over Apple because it's the open platform. As this shift happens over time, the people who win are the component vendors, not the system vendors.

That same shift could happen with diabetes. And that's exactly what I want. I want the best CGM and the best pump, and I want it all to work together, and I want open software to make it all happen. Yes, we need the FDA in there to make sure it works and it's safe — but that's the point about this. There's no reason the FDA can't be involved to figure out how to get this all working.