I've exposed myself to a large amount of input in the last 6 months. As I've gone along it's come out again as deliberate provocation of the status quo. I'm not sure I believe that desktop P2P is a good way of doing business trade, but it was fun throwing the idea in the mix to see what came out. Quite early in my thinking I swapped it for Organization Server level P2P. Every org should have a server(s) that's outward facing that it can talk direct to any other org's server(s) and expose all the public function of the Org. But that's an aside.
I like surfing metaphors, maybe because seeing Big Wednesday for the first time was a defining moment! What follows is only a map. We humans are very good at making maps (maybe it's what defines us as human) but all too often we confuse the map with the territory. Remember, it's only a metaphor.
There's a wave that began about 15 years ago in the early days of Arpanet. People at MIT like N Negroponte asked "What would it be like if there was ubiquitous broadband". We're finally at the threshold of this, and all the chaos that they predicted is upon us. The wave was a real humdinger and it's dragged in everything around it. Some people had a big enough board and caught a manageable swell that let them ride pretty high and fast. When myopic big business saw it, they tried to construct bigger and bigger boards to ride the swell, but didn't realize they needed skill as well. All those riders were watching the wave, not the shore and the shore's getting pretty close now. The wave is breaking.
Just take a few random snippets from this year's news.
- Big Music business has to go after Napster, that's what they do. But they're turning 40 million customers into criminals in the process, with a law that's unenforceable. The Belgian police have been raiding the homes of Napster users. Nobody knows how to identify an MP3 as legal or not. Sony Music is Huge and part of this. Sony Electronics is selling MP3 players and also part of this. This is bringing into question the whole area of copyright on everything that can be turned into bits. That's a huge slice of the world's economy.
- The value, or at least the amount you can charge, for content always dropped to zero over time. But the lifetime of that value has now also dropped to zero. There's no money in publishing any more. Not when everyone is a publisher. The same goes for Analysts. How long before one or more of Gartner, Aberdeen, Ovum, AMR etc crashes and burns.
- Internet based standards, the open source movement and an army of part time coders has been chipping away at the foundations of the big software empires. Even the "open" systems from the big players (like Java) are being exposed as irrelevant. Sun *has* to do JXTA, MS *has* to do .NET But by doing it, they're giving up their control and letting the hoards in.
- In B2B huge empires and fortunes were built on "It's the buyer", Dis-intermediate the middlemen, be as big as eBay, you must be neutral, If the big players band together we can beat this thing, and other myths. The myths are finally being exposed by people like Rusty and Ventro. But the analysts are so close to the players, they can't see it. They can go on churning out the same old pap "The X Market will be Y big in Z" but is anyone listening?
- The B2C world is just the same. This time it's, you must have best of breed software, you need an industrial strength content management system, it's all about capturing eyeballs, we'll make money from advertizing... As Dave W said, "Are these people talking about the same web??"
- The two years of capital market funding and the Nasdaq Ponzi scheme were an aberration that we'll look back on fondly, just like those who enjoyed it look back on 85, 86. Right now, that doesn't mean you can't start businesses and be successful. But it means that you have to grow business organically, on the back of profit. Not such a bad thing really. But it's tough if you're an averagely good employee in the Valley that thought life security came out of an option scheme.
- The rate of change is still accelerating. One example; The last year of the human genome project did 90% of the work. The tools for gene mapping, IVF, and genetic research generally are now so fast and cheap enough to be within a moderately rich individual's range. The same goes for many other areas. It really is Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.
Which brings me back to the prophets of the last 15 years. Negroponte at MIT, Kevin Kelly at Wired, R.U.Sirius at Mondo 2000, even people like Douglas Rushkoff and Esther, saw this moment coming. The point is that we already know where this is going and there's a huge amount of work to do. All the pieces are now on the board and ranged against each other. The trick is working out which bit to do first and where the sweet spots are that will allow you to surf the trends for long enough to make it happen. (And for me personally to get out of "The wrong place at the wrong time")
I'll leave you with a series of tensions that are being brought to a head.
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I like surfing metaphors, maybe because seeing Big Wednesday for the first time was a defining moment! What follows is only a map. We humans are very good at making maps (maybe it's what defines us as human) but all too often we confuse the map with the territory. Remember, it's only a metaphor.
There's a wave that began about 15 years ago in the early days of Arpanet. People at MIT like N Negroponte asked "What would it be like if there was ubiquitous broadband". We're finally at the threshold of this, and all the chaos that they predicted is upon us. The wave was a real humdinger and it's dragged in everything around it. Some people had a big enough board and caught a manageable swell that let them ride pretty high and fast. When myopic big business saw it, they tried to construct bigger and bigger boards to ride the swell, but didn't realize they needed skill as well. All those riders were watching the wave, not the shore and the shore's getting pretty close now. The wave is breaking.
Just take a few random snippets from this year's news.
- Big Music business has to go after Napster, that's what they do. But they're turning 40 million customers into criminals in the process, with a law that's unenforceable. The Belgian police have been raiding the homes of Napster users. Nobody knows how to identify an MP3 as legal or not. Sony Music is Huge and part of this. Sony Electronics is selling MP3 players and also part of this. This is bringing into question the whole area of copyright on everything that can be turned into bits. That's a huge slice of the world's economy.
- The value, or at least the amount you can charge, for content always dropped to zero over time. But the lifetime of that value has now also dropped to zero. There's no money in publishing any more. Not when everyone is a publisher. The same goes for Analysts. How long before one or more of Gartner, Aberdeen, Ovum, AMR etc crashes and burns.
- Internet based standards, the open source movement and an army of part time coders has been chipping away at the foundations of the big software empires. Even the "open" systems from the big players (like Java) are being exposed as irrelevant. Sun *has* to do JXTA, MS *has* to do .NET But by doing it, they're giving up their control and letting the hoards in.
- In B2B huge empires and fortunes were built on "It's the buyer", Dis-intermediate the middlemen, be as big as eBay, you must be neutral, If the big players band together we can beat this thing, and other myths. The myths are finally being exposed by people like Rusty and Ventro. But the analysts are so close to the players, they can't see it. They can go on churning out the same old pap "The X Market will be Y big in Z" but is anyone listening?
- The B2C world is just the same. This time it's, you must have best of breed software, you need an industrial strength content management system, it's all about capturing eyeballs, we'll make money from advertizing... As Dave W said, "Are these people talking about the same web??"
- The two years of capital market funding and the Nasdaq Ponzi scheme were an aberration that we'll look back on fondly, just like those who enjoyed it look back on 85, 86. Right now, that doesn't mean you can't start businesses and be successful. But it means that you have to grow business organically, on the back of profit. Not such a bad thing really. But it's tough if you're an averagely good employee in the Valley that thought life security came out of an option scheme.
- The rate of change is still accelerating. One example; The last year of the human genome project did 90% of the work. The tools for gene mapping, IVF, and genetic research generally are now so fast and cheap enough to be within a moderately rich individual's range. The same goes for many other areas. It really is Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.
Which brings me back to the prophets of the last 15 years. Negroponte at MIT, Kevin Kelly at Wired, R.U.Sirius at Mondo 2000, even people like Douglas Rushkoff and Esther, saw this moment coming. The point is that we already know where this is going and there's a huge amount of work to do. All the pieces are now on the board and ranged against each other. The trick is working out which bit to do first and where the sweet spots are that will allow you to surf the trends for long enough to make it happen. (And for me personally to get out of "The wrong place at the wrong time")
I'll leave you with a series of tensions that are being brought to a head.
- Map vs Territory
- Centralization vs De-Centralization
- Fat Butterfly vs Collaborative partners
- Sellers vs Markets vs Buyers
- Sony music vs Sony MP3 player
- SUN,MS vs Linux
- SOAP vs XML-RPC
- Consolidation vs Fragmentation
- Big vs Small
- Government/Big Business vs Individuals
- Publishers vs Personal Publishing
- Copyright vs KopyLeft
- Faster (Pussycat, kill kill)
- Every tribe, there's ever been, is still running. You want to play with other people who love Teddy Boy Rock from the 50s? Fine, they're out there, still playing.
- The VC driven push for Massive Success was a temporary aberration.
[ << RSC Catalogue standard ] [ P2P Open Ratings >> ]
[ 0 comments ] [ G ] [ # ]