My email service, email client, and smartphone come from three different companies. But I still expect it all to work together perfectly.

As a marketing guy, I have been thinking lately about the merits of “systems” vs. the finer attributes of “best of breed.” What am I referring to? Well, in “systems”, you choose who you want to do business with in advance, and then get everything from them, on the promise that it will all work great together. With “best of breed” you choose different offerings from a variety of providers, getting exactly what you want in each category, but then potentially face the hassle of cobbling it all together.

With cars, I’m a “system” guy. When I make a decision to buy a car, I’m also in effect deciding that their dealership will also be the ones to do all of the service on the car. I only use factory audio in a car, because, well, I just like that it is more integrated. Factory floor mats? Absolutely. I have even gone so far as to have the dealer replace my tires. One throat to choke, as they say. To be clear, I’m not defending that this is a good idea. It may be a very bad idea. But it is what I do, nonetheless, simply because I prefer it. Are there product categories where you prefer to buy into a “system” and then stick with it? I’ll bet there are.

But I’m also willing to bet that for most of us, we prefer to buy the best-of-breed in most categories. When I do this, I feel that I still have a right to get mad when it doesn’t all work seamlessly together. So do you. Companies who rely on you buying everything only from them, just to get an adequate experience, aren’t thinking about you, the consumer, the way they should.

I’m feeling this way about Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) right now. Windows Live Mail doesn’t support IMAP, and they only support email forwarding if you pay them for premium mail, which is darn hard to figure out how to do. I wanted my Windows Live mail to be readable from within my gmail account, for a number of reasons, including gmail’s superior integration with the iPhone. Well, you can’t do that. You can’t use an alternative offline client very easily, either. Basically, your choices to access your mail (and keep it in sync, which rules out POP access) are… 1) the Windows Live Mail client (which, thankfully, I love), and related Microsoft mail clients, 2) the Windows Live web service (which I don’t like as much as gmail), and 3) Windows smart phones. That’s pretty much it. I think their idea must be that if they make it really hard to use any email client other than their own, you be a more loyal customer, and not switch away. That is a crazy amount of absurd and it just makes me mad. I love my Windows Live mail and I also love my iPhone. I expect them to work together more easily than they do.

Sometimes companies who are selling a “system” make it obvious with their advertisements, which try to convince us we're better-off buying everything from them. Sony and Apple are two companies that each spend a significant amount of effort trying to convince consumers to buy their own products across-the-board, under the promise that it all works best together. And generally, it does. But at what cost? Premium prices are an acceptable cost, but to me, being trapped in a closed system by underlying proprietary technology isn’t worth it. I view Mac’s this way. I love some Apple stuff, but I feel that Apple tries to trap Mac users into using only their stuff (shouldn’t they have put in HDMI, and not mini-DisplayPort, into their latest Mac’s? My point.). This is the value of working within the most broadly adopted standards. With enough openness, the really popular products should eventually all work together very well, if their makers have the consumer’s best interests in mind.

In our household, we’re more PC than Mac. I much prefer Windows to OSX, probably because I am so familiar with it. I’m the IT guy in our family, and I look after about 8 PC’s and one Mac. But all of our networking is Apple. I prefer Apple’s configurability and I’m a huge fan of Airport Express for whole-house music distribution. We use mainly iTunes for music and video. I have been impressed with how easily Apple products (iTunes, iPod, Airport, TimeCapsule) integrate into a mostly PC environment. Quite simply, they are writing some of the best PC software out there, which ironically, is one of the reasons I have little interest in switching to Mac’s. In this sense, they are less of a closed “system” purveyor than some would say.