W
Substite all 2s with Ws. That's the suggestion here. So it's not B2B, but BWB. Business with Business. Not Business to Business. People with people. That's what Napster is about. That's what sharing music is about.
We do business withother companies. Not to them. We share music with other people, not to them.
I thought about our industry's little preposition problem while I read the latest DaveNet. Here's what Dave says —
Now the Silicon Valley investment community is rushing head-on into a new rage called P2P, for Point-to-Point, that will wash out quicker than Push Technology, B2B, B2C and all the other stupid buzzwords that fed the pyramid schemes in the late 90s.
The hype is not as important as functionality delivered to users' desktops. It's so irritating to watch the hypesters vie for headlines, as if that had anything to do with it...
P2P totally misses the point. The rage of Napster is not P2P, it's music! Get a clue.
Credit goes to Christine Boehlke of Phase Two Strategies for pointing out how the 2 in all these acronyms betrays what Cluetrain identifies as the shipping metaphor that has infected our understanding of business through the whole Industrial Age — and which seems worse than ever in our "new" economy. Witness now we've turned goods into "content" — as if you could put music and writing on a skid and move it around with a forklift.
We've gotta start thinking out of the tube. Business isn't a conduit. It's a relationship.
We're just programmers, but we're here to take over
I'm in San Diego, looking at a view approximately like the one on  the left, only from a balcony five floors above the harbor in the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina. Beautiful place, even though it's overcast this morning.
 Many years ago, when I was still in North Carolina, somebody wrote a story about San Diego for a local paper, illustrated by the "cultural map" on the right. Funny I never forgot it. I suppose it still applies.
I'm here to do a keynote at the Borland Inprise Conference, aka "Borcon." It's already fun. Borland (or Inprise, or whatever) was given up for dead a year ago. But they're persisting and coming out with some very nice cross-platform development tools.
It's all about transcending platforms these days. I'm not sure the Big Guys get it, but the programmers are in charge now. Actually, they have been for some time. Meanwhile, Microsoft's .Net strategy looks like an attack on Sun to me. Just as Sun's Java strategy always looked like an attack on Microsoft. One's coming from the desktop, the other's coming from the server, and both miss what the Net is about , which is inclusion. They talk inclusion, but on their terms. So the programmers will find ways to include both of them.
Yes, he gets it. But why?
David Weinberger points to a Q&A with Jeff Bezos in the current Wired that seems to suggest that the dude actually did read (as well as recommend Cluetrain:
Q: Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei said recently that success for his company depends on the ability to relinquish traditional notions of control. Is Amazon out of control?
A: I think in some ways it is. For example, we don't control what customers say about our prodcuts. One of the best ways to provide value to customers is by utilizing the organic forces that the Internet makes possible — if you set up the infrastructure properly, millions of people can collaborate — but some of these notions are very uncomfortable inside a company, in the same way that Idei-san is saying out of control. You can also build a better customer experience by partnering with thousands of slightly uncontrollable partners. For instance, the zShops [Amazon's specialty retail sites] sometimes get used to compete against us. I am constantly finding toys on our site that a zShop is also selling, sometimes at a lower price. If you are used to having very strong control, that is a terrifying notion. But I really believe you can build a more robust company
if you give up a bit of that control in this organic marketplace.
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