This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s... We all know how this story ends... Look, we've got to declare a moratorium on

This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s... We all know how this story ends... Look, we've got to declare a moratorium on this glib analogy. The 1980s were about a hundred years ago in terms of computing history. In 1980, the year the IBM PC was released, there was no such thing as the Web, let alone web standards. The Internet's users, if gathered together, would fit in a fairly small conference room, and they were all academics and DoD researchers exchanging email. Mass-market computers were lonely and isolated. They communicated with each other via tapes -- or, if you had the money, nice big fast 140k floppy disks -- that were sent through the mail, or via the awesome 300 baud modem, which was three to ten times slower than reading speed. There was no standard for data interchange other than the plain ASCII text file: Every program on every platform had its own data storage standard, and its own display model, and had to be custom compiled in place. The X window system was still four years in the future, for god's sake. The free software movement hadn't been invented yet. Linux was ten years in the future. Unix was largely an academic thing. Everything in computing was literally one million times more valuable in 1980 than it is today. [1] This, alone, renders these analogies to the 1980s invalid. These days we have disposable technologies that are a thousand times more powerful than the Apple II. You can buy shoes that are smarter than the IBM PC. If I feel "locked in" to my proprietary iPhone and crave the netbook experience, I spend 200 bucks and buy a netbook. That's less than last week's restaurant budget, I'm afraid. (I splurged.) Apple's "closed" ecosystem is invisibly connected to the net 100% of the time through the air, is largely constructed out of free software maintained by a ragtag network of volunteers, and has a standards-compliant web browser as its core feature. Google's "open" ecosystem depends crucially on a distant, proprietary network of machines, itself more powerful than the dreams of 1980s science fiction, that runs secret algorithms to compile and correlate data on the entire world. And people keep trying to pretend that the lessons of the 1980s are actually relevant. It's like trying to predict the future of auto racing by analyzing the results of the 1899 Kentucky Derby. --- [1] Moore's Law: Everything doubles in about 18 months. 1980 = 30 years ago = 20 doublings; 2^20 is about 1 million.