Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void gets into one of the most interesting areas of impact the Web has on the intersection between creative work and the commercialization of content.
I think that this is what Wired was looking at with its recent issue that offered a free CD of music to use.
Is the interactive future inevitable ? I think that’s the point of this recent post by Ming the Mechanic that highlights the issue that 15 lines of code in Python provides an effective P2P application … can it ever be controlled from on high ?
Increasingly it will be a world of information that is constantly flowing, fed with original and re-mixed, re-combined bits and pieces of information. Humans combining this bits and pieces will always be the final filter, as they take in the information and turn around and push info back out … publishing to a blog, or email, or to a file that will be saved in their own Personal Server. A Personal Server will be a simple and easy to use “electronic filing cabinet” that accomodates both the diligent person’s need for structure and the ad-hoc nature of many peoples’ inforaging habits.
From Gaping Void:
In a recent gapingvoid post, Microsoft employee/star blogger Robert Scoble asks the question about his employer:
Can we turn this aircraft carrier around? I don’t know, but I’m having fun trying!
Richard then counters with this point:
A collapsing empire or an aircraft carrier in search of a handbrake turn are both behemothic (mmm, neologism?). Open source trends (I include blogging in that – it’s open source publishing) can’t actually rescue them. Indeed, I propose a different analogy to either of you. Open source software and blogging are the small mammals to M$’s and big publishing’s dinosaurs. Even without the meteorite, the big lizards are doomed.
I work for a small publishing company, and the big question I’m trying to answer is one posed by Hugh and others a while back: how do you cope when bundled content is dead? What do those of use whose revenue model is bundled content and intermediation do five years from now when a generation of media consumers is used to creating their own bundles? M$ has the same question to answer: when software development doesn’t rely on big gangs of coders and creators and distributors and consultants – on overhead, basically – what then?
And then I pipe in:
Richard, good point. What you have illustrated is the often corrupting influence of taking your company public.
At least in the USA, a private company can go, “The goalposts have moved. Screw it. Move on. Build a new biz model which relies on 2,000 people, not 60,000. Have it up n’ running by next Christmas”.
Because a public company is ALWAYS beholden to Wall Street, it cannot do that. It can only do stuff which is good for the next Quarter.
What is good for the business is not always good for Wall Street, and vice versa.
If MS does have a meteor, methinks it’s the same meteor that once happily gave Bill Gates billions of dollars. The one that will insist MS remain a large, cold-blooded lizard, and forbid it to change into a small, furry mammal.
If MS goes under, it will not be Open Source that puts MS out of business. MS’s owners (i.e. Wall Street) will put MS out of business.
Bill and his top management are extremely smart people. I’ll wager they already know all this, and already have a possible exit strategy well thought out. I’ll also wager Robert and people of similar rank at Microsoft have no earthly clue what it is.
But who knows. Predicting the future is a hazardous business. So is underestimating Microsoft.
Suffice it to say that two worlds are colliding here … a monopolistic outlook on personal-productivity software (Word, excel and Powerpoint) and the world where easy-to-use blogging tools and an increasingly effective infrastructural of link management are creating a new environment for creating and exchanging information.
No wonder Microsoft has come out with MSN Spaces. This intersection – Microsoft personal productivity software and the capabilities for self-expression offered by blogs – is where the world will come to life on the Web over the next decade or so.
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