§ June 16th, 2008§ Filed under Web 2.0Comments Off
This past Saturday morning I attended a conference at Cal Tech here in Pasadena on web platforms. The similarities between operating system platforms and web-based platforms really struck me. Specifically, it seems there is an analog to the FSF’s four freedoms of FOSS and the freedoms provided by various web platforms.
These freedoms are not to be confused with Marc Andreessen’s ontology of web platforms. His typology is architectural — more akin to the distinctions between operating systems, middleware and applications. But among Andreessen’s Level 3 “run-time environment” web platforms (current and planned) such as Salesforce.com, Ning, Facebook, Amazon AWS and Google App Engine, there are different freedoms afforded to users.
The freedom to use your own data. (See the social web users’ Bill of Rights.)
The freedom to design a unique user interface (without requiring platform logos or “badgeware”).
The freedom to develop your own apps (even if they compete with the platform’s own apps).
The freedom to embed apps running on other (competing) platforms.
The freedom to easily take your apps elsewhere.
This list certainly needs to be refined. But it’s a useful starting point to compare the various platforms on the market. Facebook has mightily resisted providing freedom number 1, resulting in a potential opening for Ning and others. Salesforce.com (their platform offering is called Force.com) promises freedoms 1-3, but to my knowledge doesn’t support freedom 4 and definitely does not support freedom 5. It isn’t enough to expose APIs if those APIs are custom and proprietary to the platform, since this locks in the user. Hence the impetus for Open Social, an initiative for standard platform APIs that wants to provide portability of applications.
For a user of the platforms, the more freedom the better. But this is where the analogy with open source comes in — use of the platforms must be monetized. In the consumer space this happens with ads, and in the business space this happens with by-the-sip pricing, but these freedoms can create opportunities for free riders, just as in open source.
But, more so than with open source, we need to remember that it’s very early days for web platforms. We’re seeing the concept of platform moving from an operating system to the entire web itself. It will take some time for the economics, the technology and the marketplace to sort itself out.
Via my esteemed colleague Ed Murphy, here is a video on web 2.0 by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. I’m sure this is getting rapid viral dissemination throughout the noosphere, but I find it so compelling I just have to join the blog storm. What I find so interesting isn’t necessarily the concepts (they are important, but we’ve been talking about these things for years) but the presentation. Leave it to the anthropologists to make web 2.0 concepts accessible to the masses.
Everyone describes Kim Cameron as someone wanting to do what’s right for all of us, not just for Microsoft, and I’m sure that’s true. I can’t help, though, but look at it from Ballmer’s or Gates’ perspective…why interoperate with another OS vendor? Why not keep it all closed, distribute InfoCard with Vista, and take over the identity layer of web 2.0?
I think it’s because Microsoft execs understand that their world is changing.
The desktop OS market has long been a natural monopoly, similar to power distribution, water and sewage, and (until a few years ago) telephones. Just as there is a great dis-economy to having two power grids, two sets of water and sewage mains or two telephone lines into your house, there has been a huge dis-economy to having two desktop operating systems. Regardless of any technical merit, the world largely settled on DOS and Windows as the common desktop platform because, at least for the enterprise customer, it was too expensive not to conform. And of course Microsoft has succeeded by leveraging the natural monopoly in the operating system market into adjacent markets, themselves often a natural monopoly as well.
But as software moves from the desktop to the internet, the desktop will no longer be a natural monopoly. Users don’t have to run the same desktop OS to access SOA software on the web. Software developers don’t have to develop for a specific desktop platform — they can just develop for the web. The dis-economies of multiple desktop OSs is disappearing, thanks to open standards and SOA.
Regardless of what some may think of Ballmer and Gates, they understand the world as well as the rest of us. I suspect they’ve played out this scenario and have concluded that closing InfoCard off will not result in yet another Microsoft-dominated natural monopoly, but instead, a marginalized Microsoft. Since InfoCard couldn’t possibly achieve complete ubiquity as the sole identity provider, keeping InfoCard closed would result in Passport The Next Generation.
§ February 23rd, 2006§ Filed under Web 2.0Comments Off
Web 2.0 is now a political issue. I thought it was only of interest to the techno-savvy, but apparently it’s bigger than that — it bespeaks narcissism, communism, utopianism and lots of other bad -isms.
Who knew?
Nick Carr has a post titled The New Narcissism referring to on an article by Andrew Keen in the Weekly Standard, the arch-conservative political magazine. In it, Keen says:
SO WHAT, exactly, is the Web 2.0 movement? As an ideology, it is based upon a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone–even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us–can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 “empowers” our creativity, it “democratizes” media, it “levels the playing field” between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is “elitist” traditional media.
Empowered by Web 2.0 technology, we can all become citizen journalists, citizen videographers, citizen musicians. Empowered by this technology, we will be able to write in the morning, direct movies in the afternoon, and make music in the evening.
Sounds familiar? It’s eerily similar to Marx’s seductive promise about individual self-realization in his German Ideology[...]
