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The Internet has been raised on the shoulders of giants - people who basically devoted their lives to it. The current wave is brought up by these trying to gra
by alexro 11y ago
The Internet has been raised on the shoulders of giants - people who basically devoted their lives to it.
The current wave is brought up by these trying to grab a piece of the Web and keep others at bay, the game is ruled by investors. This bunch only understands walled gardens, no hope to talk them into open thinking. At all.
We've already had this discussed more than once that people themselves do not care about any particular approach, people just want something to work.
As long as commercial services do the job people will use them.
Like with any freedom movement there should be the underlying philosophy that will live long enough for others to finally catch on.
But going just head on like the author suggests will not help. If you start a new service the last thing you want to spend your resources on is a RFC. And you won't ever get more resources than the investors of AOL 2.0. Unfortunately.
- jackgavigan 11y ago> The current wave is brought up by these trying to grab a piece of the Web and keep others at bay, the game is ruled by investors. This bunch only understands walled gardens, no hope to talk them into open thinking. At all. Sadly, my experience has been that this is true. Walled gardens allow the companies that control them to capture all of the value created within them, which is far more attractive to a VC firm than a company that's looking to create an open standard/platform that others will be able to use.
- kuschku 11y agoIt’s the reason why long-term, VC firms (like Y Combinator) and the US startup culture have to fail. All of them focus only on short-term, exponential growth. That is not sustainable. The only question is if humanity will die due to the environmental effects of exponential growth first, or if these companies default first.
- icebraining 11y agoMost YC startups are simply providing their own small service at the edge, without trying to take over their users' lives and dominate the net: http://yclist.com/ http://yclist.com/ Beware of trying to judge phenomena by their news reporting on mass media, it's often biased towards outliers.
- hluska 11y agoThe unfortunate (or maybe fortunate) part is that data shows that occasionally, short-term exponential growth creates massive companies (ie - Google and Facebook) with relatively minimal marketing charges. I remember when Facebook was first available at my University. Seemingly overnight, all of the LiveJournals died and Facebook absolutely took control.
- kuschku 11y agoIt’s unsustainable growth, though. Facebook is even today far overvalued. Their price has to crash at some point. And even Google is stagnating.