The Web Is Dead? A Debate | Magazine

O’Reilly to Anderson:
Open and closed are in a great dance.

I’ve always felt that the lock-in via network effects was as inevitable as gravity, or the changeable weather, or the sun coming up again in the morning after disappearing in the evening. Open and closed are in a great dance, always have been. Openness is where innovation happens; closedness is where value is captured. And then it all begins over again. The open PC hardware architecture gave us closed software; open source software and the open protocols of the internet gave us Google, and Amazon, and Facebook. So the question is where the next wave of openness and innovation comes from, and how we can encourage it to come more quickly.

There’s also this: despite the dominance of individual companies over vast realms of data, the services of the future will require cooperation. While there is a chance that a single company (with Apple and Google being the front runners) will own enough of the critical pieces of the future Internet operating system to control the whole thing, it’s more likely that interoperability and cooperation will still be needed to build the services of the future.

That’s why in my advocacy about the Internet operating system, I’ve always emphasized that there are two models: A Tolkienesque “One ring to rule them all” (you might remember when Marc Andreesen thought he’d found the one ring to take the rule away from Microsoft; Steve Jobs seems to think he has hold of the one ring now) versus “Small pieces loosely joined,” which has been the model for Linux and for the Internet as a whole.

So think about open vs closed: the big challenge is not to keep the web completely “open” (that’s a Stallmanesque vision in which no one gets to capture any value) but to keep it open enough that it keeps generating new opportunities.

Right now, we’re in a very interesting period, in which a couple of companies are accumulating enough assets (and I don’t mean financial assets, though they are doing that too) that they have a plausible chance of building a comprehensive platform of their own. So we have to persuade those companies that it’s in their interest to continue to cooperate with other companies, and not to go the one ring route (Google is trying to go this route, fighting the tendency to one-ring thinking, though often losing, while Apple seems to be embracing it as a goal).

One way to do this is to identify the various points of control, who owns the various subsystems, and build services that rely on multiple providers rather than just one. And frankly, it’s working out pretty well. Facebook is getting a good hold on identity services (with LinkedIn doing a great job on the professional side); Google has their dominance in search, and is getting there in location, and is ahead of the curve on speech (though if Nuance gets their internet act together that could change); payment is up for grabs; Amazon set off an arms race at the cloud infrastructure level … In short, there’s lots and lots of competition.

Overall, there’s lots to be happy about. When the industry is competitive, as it is now, and there’s lots of money to be made, as there is now, we see lots of innovation. So I’m actually pretty sanguine about where things are going.

FWIW, I’m not terribly taken in by the rhetoric that says that because content silos are going up, and we’re seeing more paid content, the open web is over. Individuals, small companies, entrepreneurs, artists, all have enormous ability to share and distribute their work and find an audience. I don’t see that becoming less in today’s environment.

That is not to say that there isn’t a lot to worry about. But the evolution of an industry is always forward. We talk about “the marketplace” as though it’s a static thing. But it’s more like a river. There are broad, slow moving parts, and there are rapids. We’re heading into some exciting rapids. And the only way forward is through.

via wired.com

so the debate continues, and now replies by Wired

Posted via email from #think: Freddie's posterous