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Re: Pipes or Place
Re: 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. We're talking about two different kinds of infrastructure here. What you and Don are talking about is platform infrastructure. It's something only commercial companies seem able to do. And while it may cover a lot of ground, and achive near-ubiquity, it isn't the deeper kind of NEA stuff that the Net is made of. That's what I try to get at through talks like this one about infrastructure. If Word- and Outlook-type infrastructure were the only kind, we would never have had the Net. Companies like Microsoft and AOL — and even IBM and Sun — often contribute to deeper infrastructure, but they fall short if they insist on owning and controlling it. Case in point: Sun with Java. Close, but no cigar. Back in the days before the Net, we used to talk about "standards" and "openness" as insfrastructural ideals; but we lacked a universal infrastructure to concretize those ideals. Now, thanks to the Net, we have that infrastructure. And it's important to make a distinction between that kind of infrastructure and the infrastructural stuff that sits on top of it. 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. Word isn't the standard here. It's the .doc file format. Thanks to StarOffice, OpenOffice, ThinkFree and other compatible products, that format is likely to stabilize as something essentially outside Microsoft's control. My prediction, anyway. At the very least it'll become harder and harder for Microsoft to keep forking the format with every new revision of their own versions of Word. 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. You might be right. On the one hand, I believe the Net will survive both its regulators and its opponents; but without activisim in both areas, history will move a lot slower.
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