Nice quote from Marten Mickos

Dharmesh Shah [2006-04-26 08:05 PM]

I'm afraid that despite my best efforts, I just have not consumed enough of the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid.

The ecosystem is the computer? Collaboration is the operating system?

I'm just not getting it. The best I can do is think: "the computer is the ecosystem", but that's as far as I can get.

Can those that "get it" please explain what this means?

Thanks.

Josh Peters [2006-04-27 11:49 AM]

Dharmesh, I'll do my best :)

The Web 2.0 philosophy seems to be that you no longer have closed products that do one particular thing. Every application now has a public API for allowing outsiders to remix and benefit from a given offering. Also everything is available in different formats like Atom and RSS which are both pretty friendly to hacker-types.

This encourages collaboration. Google seems to be the poster-child for this movement in a lot of ways because they seem to enjoy it very much when people use their tools in unexpected ways.

In the olden days a company (or organization) had to either copy an existing service or license it and put it on their own servers, but in the Web 2 days a much more open environment is the norm. Google, Yahoo!, and even Microsoft are really beginning to benefit from the advantages of open formats, published public APIs, and discouraging "my way or the highway" thinking.

Collaboration is the new way of getting things done, as opposed to using a particular packaged system from a single vendor. The web now allows companies to offer new services built around other services in ways that weren't really possible before.

Cell phones and other web services are just as valid a client as a desktop computer is. It's become a good thing to not predict how someone will use your site and it's very good to not force customers into doing things in a particular way.

Then again, maybe I don't get it either ;)

Dharmesh Shah [2006-04-27 08:35 PM]

Josh,

Thanks for the explanation. It made good sense. I wrote an article on the topic of
The Dangers Of Google As Platform so I do sort of get it. :)

Tim: Apologies for the sarcasm in my original comment to Marten's quote. Guess it indeed was a little over the top for me.