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Re: Pipes or Place
Hi Doc, Hamish, This is what I was getting at when I e-mailed you a couple of weeks ago. Don Norman points it out in The Invisible Computer. Infrastructure is a winner-take-all proposition, which leads to - how you say - "natural" monopolies? Still not clear on what that means exactly, but that's how it was explained to me. Thus MS, and not just the OS. Word and Outlook display de-facto infrastructure characteristics. In my biz, e-learning, authoring almost always has to happen in Word. Because everyone uses it, it attracts support, which drives everyone to use it, whether it's the best tool or not. Which may explain why it theoretically does everything except my laundry. Competing infrastructures, akin to standards, don't remain competitive very long. Seems to me the net is a new commons, as mentioned here, like rivers and streams still are (at least east of the Rockies). There's not much evidence that the market mechanism will in any way protect this resource without regulation and protection spurred by a lot of vocal activism. Even the scarcity / abundance argument plays in here. I was thinking of making the comparison (glad I didn't) about water rights east and west of the Rockies. I believe that in the West the private ownership of water contributes to the Water Wars. But it's a bad case because scarcity is also an issue. Here in the east it's never been a scarcity issue, yet the rivers have been polluted for decades, and still are to the extent the regulations allow, and beyond. Norlin's abundance argument, doesn't eliminate local, temporal scarcities that drive demand and pricing within their limits. I like the road comparison too. Made me think of Kerouac, and who will write the comparable work. Maybe you! Maybe us!
Dave Feasey There are responses to this message:
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