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Speaker: There's certainly, in my own mind, a battle going on for the soul of the web.
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Speaker: Um-hum.
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Speaker: You know, there is a fundamental, you know, architecture that has carried the Internet forward very, very well, which is some decentralized servers, decentralized clients, and open-standards protocols --
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Speaker: Sure.
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Speaker: -- That go between them. There's this new game in town, of course, which is the -- that has led -- you know, what I called Web2.0 was the accumulation of data in systems that get better the more people use them.
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Speaker: Of course.
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Speaker: And that leading to network effects, you end up with a set of players who, you know, as George Orwell once said, "Some animals are more equal than others."
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Speaker: Right.
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Speaker: And, you know, then the question is what is the level at which interoperability ought to be happening. Is it that -- is that old Internet story over, and are we now saying, you know, Google owns search, and Google owns, you know, location, and meanwhile, you know, Twitter and Facebook are duking it out over a certain level of activity stream, and Facebook is owning a certain kind of social graft, and it's gonna be winner takes all. And then we'll have an oligarchy of these, you know, these sort of kings of their relative hills who work together, or will it really be the original decentralized Internet.
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Speaker: I mean, do you always go to the same Italian restaurant? Do you always eat the same Chinese food from the same restaurant?
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Speaker: I don't know about that.
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Speaker: But I think there are parallels here with, you know, if you look at like, CPM and Windows, developing for those platforms. There are cycles in history of proprietary and open and proprietary and open. It usually is kind of ahead of the curve of what's next.
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Speaker: Yeah.
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Speaker: And I think that that's a lot of what we're seeing. The question it really comes down to me is what should -- you know, so I'll take some of the heat off of Dick here. So let's talk about Facebook for a little bit. You know, where should the -- the question is what do you compete over? Do you compete over the fact that something is proprietary at the level of communication? Or do you compete over some, you know, user experience being better, or some mobile experience being better, or integration with older members of your family or younger members of your family being better, or privacy? Whatever. There's a difference between competing on features --
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Speaker: Yeah.
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Speaker: -- And then competing on, you know, just proprietary kind of lock in.
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Speaker: Yeah.
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Speaker: And I think my favorite example of this is I remember Sun Servers back in the day had power cables that didn't match anyone else's because they just wanted that extra 20 bucks for the power cable. You know what I mean? So they were making money off of proprietary plugs in the wall, right? It's crazy. What they should have competing on was features. So, you see, you know, it sort of got to market, and that was great. And it's really opened everyone's eyes, and that's what it succeeded at doing, you know, and that's awesome. But is that how they are gonna compete going forward, and is that how Facebook's gonna compete going forward?
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Speaker: Right.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
