Who Will Rule The New Internet?
An anonymous wit scratched those lines on the side of a junked car door and lugged it to a trail near my home in Northern California. The middle of a pristine, ancient redwood grove is the wrong place to find a rusted-out car door, but the words magically transformed the thing from an aggravating piece of junk into art. I Googled the quote as soon as I got home, of course, but found nothing. (Thanks to Google, we live in a world where “I don’t know” has become an unacceptable response. So my inability to identify the author there is driving me crazy.)
My town is pretty close to Silicon Valley, and most of my neighbors make their living in technology, while I make mine writing about it. All of us, though, worship at the altar of bright and shiny things. These days, it’s the impending launch of Apple’s next-generation iPhone that has the faithful davening. If the whispers of pending miracles are to be believed, this new phone could end up becoming the next big “platform.”
A platform, to computer people, is the software code on which third-party applications function. There are scores of big platforms out there—something like three dozen in the international mobile-phone business alone. But a truly successful one can extend far beyond its immediate group of users and effectively create and control an enormous market. In the computer industry, IBM dominated the first commercial platform with its expensive mainframes and operating systems, aimed at corporate users. Seemingly overnight, IBM was supplanted by Microsoft and its Windows operating system as the PC revolution took hold. Windows, in turn, is now losing its power as the Web—owned by no one, accessible to all—becomes the dominant platform. (Yes, the Web is nothing more than a big layer of code; all those websites we visit are merely applications that sit atop it.)
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