Re: UKNM: The next stage in the game - ?????

[Clay Shirky]

> How many people are now clued up on WAP, Open, Liberate et al? How

> many people will be playing catchup in a year/month/week's time?


No one.


No one will be playing catchup in a week or a month or a year.


We have been seeing, since 1995, company after company -- AOL,

Marimba, Microsoft, @home, et al. -- announce that the Next Big Thing

was coming, and that everybody who was using those boring old browsers

and that boring old HTML was going to be playing catch up when their

shiny new proprietary technology replaced all these silly open

standards.


It never happened, and its not going to happen any time soon. DHTML

has not revolutionized the world, there's 10 times more Java on the

server than the client, MSN did not eclipse AOL, and AOL itself

reengineered to be less an online service than an fancy ISP, and guess

what? I can *still* buy books on amazon using Netscape 1.22.


The technological revolution has already happened - it took place in

1994, with the public release of Mosaic 0.97. The revolution thats

happening now is an economic revolution, but not a technological one.

New devices must be designed to interoperate with the Web *as it

esists today*, or they will die -- Open is doomed for this very reason

-- since anyone who already interoperates with the web inherits a vast

and expanding landscape, whereas anyone who announces new standards

and new content creation tools will never acquire enough developers to

make a dent in the existing infrastructure.


-clay

********************

UKNM is sponsored by Excite UK, visit us at http://www.excite.co.uk.

Email Khalil Ibrahimi

khalilexcitecorp [dot] com (mailto:khalilexcitecorp [dot] com)

 to advertise on Excite.

********************

Change your UKNM subscription use http://www.chinwag.com/uknm.html