The opening general session was a meeting of luminaries for an on-stage chat and (semi-)heated debate – Tim O’reilly, Rich Green, Tim Bray and Ian Murdoch.
Firstly, Open Source:
Tim O’Reilly stated by highlighting how we could learn from the evolution of the IBM PC. As it turns out, the Internet is the platform; built on Open Source, though the services provided on it are not necessarily being Open Source, it’s really many things:
- Services not packaged apps
- Data Aggregators, not just software
And the key to it all, are the network effects from user collaborations, which lead to market dominance.
Web 2.0
It seems the focus on licensing of technology was a red herring, what mattered more are:
- Modular architectures that allow programs to collaborate
- Internet as the enabler for collaborative development
- Users as co-contributors. Personally, I believe this one stems back to the days when the Internet was created when it’s use was seen as one where everyone was a peer and the thought was as both publisher and consumer in near equal quantities. As things evolved, there were few publishers, and many consumers. Now comes the user contributed revolution…
He went on to illustrate with a piece about the Law of Conservation of Attractive profits, a temporal stage of potential for exploitation, where prospective profits emerge adjacent to innovations, and the commodity concepts are software, and proprietary software is a service.
This leads to systems that harness network effects of key contributors e.g. Craigslist, and hence Web 2.0. So the most powerful sites on the web build or harness network effects through an architecture of participation.
- Data is the next ‘Intel Inside’. On data, they quoted Norwich Union in the UK, who are offering a new ‘pay as you drive’ insurance, the cost of which is based on how far you drive through data captured in the vehicle, and potentially the way you drive in the future e.g. speed.
- the rise of the perpetual beta aka ‘Live’ software. He quoted Mark Lucovsky (Google, ex. Microsoft), who said ‘how cool is that – I can finish this project tonight and push it live tomorrow’. This is vs. the upto 3 years cycle he had to wait at Microsoft.
The teams that seem to work best are small ‘two pizza’ teams like those at Amazon, building small pieces of software loosely joined.
It all starts to sound plausible, how events panned out. I like Tim’s standard question he applies to everything – ‘What would Google do, if Google provided X?’
For example, if they were your phone company, wouldn’t they automatically build your address book for you from calls made and received, and allow you to call anyone of them just like that? Not just the last 5 calls you received, like you get on your phone.
To push further forward development of software has to be more accessible to normal users, and that’s what is starting to happen now.
Tim’s vision for Web 3.0, is one where apps are driven by what we do, rather than how we interact with them; one where we stop typing, start gesturing, and cell phones collect GPS data and have inertia sensors. Only then will we see something really surprising.
More and more there will be more contention for the users first few clicks, and delivery of in-line content.
Not a bad first session.
What did feature highly during the session was the Rich Green ‘Wired/Tired’ hot list :-
- Gestalt,
- Deep DNA Concept,
- the Swiss mode of providing software,
- Virtual Space,
- Aura.
I think I need a tag cloud…and a coffee.