I run the main software marketing team for the Learn platform at Blackboard and we were starting down the path of refreshing our platform positioning for the coming year. One of the key messages we had to refresh was our commitment to openness because we really have done a lot to support it in the past year and we are doing a lot more in 2011.

Here’s the problem though. Going out to the software market with an openness message these days is like going out and saying your product is ‘enterprise.’ Just what does it mean? Most software vendors claim to be enterprise just as most claim their products to be ‘easy to use,’ ‘customizable,’ and ‘extensible.’ These terms have become meaningless.

It’s not that these terms describe features or capabilities of software that are not important to users and buyers, but that everyone uses them, and to describe a wide range of capabilities, making them worthless in evaluating a software product. Let me return to the term ‘open’ and show a few examples to demonstrate what I mean.

Recently, Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google overseeing Android development, kicked off his twitter presence with the following tweet:

This may look cryptic to the uninitiated, but to certain technical-minded people, Andy is defining ‘open’ as open source. To the open source community, open means having access to and ability to change the source code and nothing else. He is preaching to the choir though. To those who can’t understand this tweet, a majority of phone users, his definition of open gets them nowhere. In fact, for most device owners, even those who could build their own installation of Android, this definition is meaningless since their carrier doesn’t give them access to install a custom build of Android on their phones.

So, is access to the source code the definition of open? For some, yes. For most, who cares?

Here is another example from a tangential debate. Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen recently said, “Apple would like to keep things closed and proprietary,” referring to Apple’s refusal to let Adobe run its Flash interpreter on the iPhone and iPad. The irony here is that Apple prefers that developers use HTML5, an open standard, but Adobe’s CEO is defining openness as being about user choice: “let me run whatever software I want on my phone, despite the potential consequences.”

So, is the definition of open related to choice, for many, yes it is, but again, not for everyone. For developers who don’t want to be tied to Adobe’s Flash platform, Apple is being more open by embracing and open standard. And here is yet another definition of open, that of embracing and implementing standards.

These are just a few examples from the recent flurry of definitions of open and openness that are raging in the technology world, but they are enough to illustrate the problem. How were we (my team and I) supposed to talk to the market about our very real openness advances without getting lost in the current market ambiguities about the term? The only answer was for us to do some real reflecting on why we, as a company, had committed to being more open. What did we expect our users to get out of it? Why were they asking for it in the first place? What types of changes were we implementing to address it?

The conclusion we came to was that we were removing barriers, removing barriers to using our software, to extending our software, and to using the data generated in our software. We decided to focus on that message, because that is what users care about. How did we achieve the removal of barriers, well, by opening the technology, and what does opening the technology mean? It means supporting standards for content import/export and tool sharing like Common Cartridge and IMS Basic LTI. It means supporting user interface standards for accessibility and working National Federation of the Blind to gain their accessibility certification and open the technology to sight-impaired users. It means documenting our database schema and letting users mine it for learning data. These are just a few ways we are being more open, but each of them removes barriers and that is the primary message.

I pose the same challenge to Google, Adobe, and the other bigger players out there. Don’t just tell us you are open, tell us why and why we should care. What do we get out of it? Andy Rubin’s tweet is for the few, but Android is a mass market operating system. Why does the average Android user care that the operating system is open source?

It is important that software marketers (and anyone speaking on behalf of the company is a marketer) be careful about jumping on buzz words just to give our products “me too” status. Our job is to differentiate our products and to define their value. We have a responsibility to our companies for this work because the market is competitive and we have a responsibility to users for this work because the market can be confusing.