I missed this earlier in the week when Gary originally posted it, but caught the echoes of it this weekend.
TeledyN: Living with Webservices:
Of course, it’s early now and history tells us that the early market-share owners tend to have a large say in the eventual standards, but history also tells us we don’t get far with divide-and-conquer market strategies. Whether it’s Skype or FlickR, Amazon reviews, FOAF files or bookmarks, I’ve said it before and I say it again, the better strategy is to make the pond as large as possible lest you become the fat fish in a shot-glass.
The old quote — the best way to predict the future is to invent it[1] — comes to mind. It’s interesting to ponder the services mentioned in Gary’s piece and reflect how open infrastructures and ideas have fared in the market vs closed or proprietary ones. While the closed variety often gets out to a commanding lead in mind and marketshare, when the reasons for adopting that strategy — marketshare and revenue — are relegated behind openness, cooperations, respect for users, etc., it helps to remember that “it’s early yet.”
Gary has stuffed a lot of insight and experience into this essay: he’s been working on and with the internet since before most of us had heard of it or knew what it was. (That includes me: I was using packet-switched networking to get to the WELL via CompuServe’s dialup service, but I was unaware of what it meant. I just knew I was able to make a local call and teleport my mind across the country.) Some of these things — Flickr, del.icio.us — I have yet to really look at. I’ll be re-reading this a time or two more.
fn1. Alan Kay.
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