6 ms·

O'Reilly: "We're heading into a war for control of the web."

133 points by lecha 17y ago

lecha 17y ago
"we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. " The argument makes a lot of sense, but why is Amazon in this list? It is true that Amazon is in the war for control. But that war is for control of the data center, not for control of the web.
- allenp 17y ago
  Amazon is looking for control of online retail as well, especially with their recent purchase of Zappos. I don't know how this fits in to a battle with the other contenders however.
  - TheEarlyShow 17y ago
    I think the implication may be swaying over into the box store segment. Meaning, while they may not be battling other online entities, they are doing a lot of pushing against the online presence of several box retailers.
- coderdude 17y ago
  I would think Amazon deserves to be on that list more than Apple. Apple as a platform doesn't even make sense. What are they doing to become infrastucture for others to build upon, the app store? Amazon made cloud computing popular, did they not? Edit: My comment reads like I'm getting defensive for Amazon, and or bashing Apple. I'm not.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  why is Amazon in this list? Kindle, I suspect. Remember, this is being written by Tim O'Reilly, a person who has reason to know and care about the Kindle's position in the digital-text marketplace and the relative openness (or lack of openness) of the platform. I agree that Amazon Web Services doesn't seem to belong on this list. AWS is a powerful offering, but it's not as if Amazon has an exclusive lock on the Linux virtual server business. I believe that even their provisioning API is in the process of being cloned in open source.
  - lecha 17y ago
    Ah yes, thanks. Kindle slipped my mind. It makes sense now. Kindle does have a potential to become a walled-garden ecosystem reminiscent to Apple. There's nothing Kindle wants more than to become an iPod of books and will very likely curb the Web experience on Kindle to suit its business needs.
- rapind 17y ago
  I would remove Facebook from that sentence, not Amazon. Amazon, Apple, and Google are three heavyweights with a slightly different focus and strengths, but who find themselves competing more and more often for a sort of internet consumer dominance. They compete at several platforms: 1. The storefront (iTunes and Amazon, Google's in there as search and recommendations). 2. The datacenter / cloud (AWS, MobileMe, Docs / Gmail / more to come from Google) 3. Mobile devices (iPhone + iPod, Android, Kindle) There are other companies competing in each of these areas of course, but these three companies really excel at taking over markets (very smart people running them) and it's going to be interesting to see them going head to head as they reach into each others core markets. Plus I think they'll destroy most other competitors in each of these areas as they battle it out.
  - bjelkeman-again 17y ago
    Usually they say the future belongs to the kids. I see a lot of kids that live in Facebook these days. They don't read books, they don't buy music online, they don't care much for mail. Facebook definitely has a place among these three.
    - rapind 17y ago
      No doubt you're right. I guess it's just a generational thing. I hear Google, Amazon, iTunes, and I see immediate value. For some reason, even though I'm aware of all (or at least most) of the arguments that place value in Facebook / Twitter etc. I still wouldn't feel comfortable investing in it. I'm probably dating myself pretty badly, but they look fluffy to me.
- jhancock 17y ago
  kindle and streaming media. Amazon doesn't compete with iTunes/NetFlix yet, but they want to.
albertsun 17y ago
Fits in well with this recent story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 about it being time for personal servers. Just like I can run my own blog on my own server with Wordpress instead of needing to have it hosted on Wordpress.com, I wish someone would release an open source webmail client of equivalent quality to Gmail that could be installed on personal servers, would also support XMPP, etc. Same for other cloud software now. Why not offer it as an upfront purchase price, plus a continuing support contract, with the software running on hardware that the end user has ultimate control over.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I use horde for webmail, I don't use XMPP but I think it is supported.
  - xinsight 17y ago
    While Horde is an open-source email reader, it's not in the same league as gmail. Not even close.
    - e1ven 17y ago
      I've had decent experiences with Roundcube, if you're looking for a more AJAX-driven client; The versions I've tested were a bit buggy, but that was a few years back, I'm sure it's improved by now. http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/
  - litewulf 17y ago
    Webmail is, I think, a substantially "easier" problem (with the caveat that this is mainly for technically proficient users) I use gmail for email hosting but it all routes through a domain I control, so if Google one day goes crazy, I can switch out of gmail. (And IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off), whereas things like my facebook friends are much harder to migrate.
    - pyre 17y ago
neovive 17y ago
Very interesting article. It's clear that large (non-interoperable) silos are forming across the various aspects of the web -- content, data and infrastructure. Developers should be concerned as this will bring us back to a time where we need to build 3-4 versions of everything. However, the industry changes fast and this competition may open up opportunities for smaller players to fulfill various needs.
TheEarlyShow 17y ago
It's one of the better articles that Tim has put out as of late. I still don't get the angst against Apple and their approach though. If you don't care for it, don't use it - what's the big deal? Apple has went out of its way to complete a infrastructure and effectively trained it's customers to make purchases in small amounts. From music and etc content, to anything in the App store. That's their ecosystem. In what other market can you go inside and and just start putting products on their shelf and that be ok? I mean, I'd _love_ to walk into Wal-Mart and put a whole stock of pull-my-finger novelty gifts in aisle 9. Sarcasm aside, I can't see how developers can bitch about an ecosystem that they're wanting to exploit. Otherwise they'd be building little j2me applications for the RAZR, or apart of the Blackberry ecosystem, or... . But every other day there's someone new on a blog griping about something they well and truly signed up for. Android is about to be out en mass with the upcoming phones, Blackberry already has a mass of phones. Teach those users to make purchases in an ecosystem that isn't going to be easy to do so and then leverage it. But to soapbox against Apple just doesn't make sense to me.
- gaius 17y ago
  He makes a bad analogy because 1) you never needed Microsoft's permission to develop a Windows app and 2) developers on Windows (very nearly) had the "write once, run anywhere" promise that Java still hasn't lived up to taken for granted. Plus there were very low barriers to entry for developers in the Windows world; anyone could knock something up in VB or Access and nearly anyone else could get it to work on their Windows PC with minimal effort. Try doing that on the 50 (100?) Linux distros out there...
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux distros without too much trouble: static linking. You'll still need to support 32 and 64 bits so it isn't completely painless but it's a lot better than trying to cope with all the flavours.
    - gaius 17y ago
protomyth 17y ago
I am a little confused when we talk about "The Web" and include applications for mobile devices. I am really more concerned with what HTML5 is capable of and how widely it is implemented. The iPhone, in my mind, is more like the XBox or PSP model of development.
- olefoo 17y ago
  Given that many of these walled garden technologies use web-content within applications (a lot of iphone apps are nothing more than site-specific browsers with minimal custom UI chrome), and that most of them restrict access to programmer and debugging tools (enforced by law on devices that promise DRM to content-providers). An iPhone, an XBox, a PSP or any other device that can serve as a general purpose computer but does not allow the end-user to do so is taking away freedom 0. You may be willing to make that choice in the short term, for this year's fad gadget, but will you want to be locked into it?
chris100 17y ago
It's a thought-provoking article. But I don't embrace the culture of free as much as Tim. If he gets his way, no company would be allowed to profit, everything would be open. Somehow, Google would be the only one to survive in the environment. Tim is not shocked that Google is giving away for free the GPS software and therefore killing the GPS device makers. It would be anti-dumping if software had a fixed cost, but it doesn't... Where is the fine-line between playing dirty and being a great contributor to free technologies? Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position. The thought-provoking part of the article is what Tim leaves out. What does an open world look like? Can the world be 100% open, or will there always be large companies fighting to control it? To me, it sounds a little bit utopian to hope or assume that 100% open is possible.
- gloob 17y ago
  Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position. And that's the difference: Microsoft had a monopolistic position. Open-source doesn't, so much. What's more, open-source isn't even an organization, so it doesn't even make semantic sense to say that it could have a monopolistic position. Google (specifically) is a different matter. If they become a monopoly, smack them down. It makes little difference to free/open-source software at large, though.
raintrees 17y ago
And meanwhile, the whole debate may get t-boned in the intersection by the banning of net neutrality. Only those (large?) partners that make deals with (large?) ISPs get their applications to work fast and smooth (if at all?). It seems we have several fronts to watch/defend...
- access_denied 17y ago
  There is not much industry organizations in IT. Small shops should found stuff.
wingo 17y ago
Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is, and re-found the GNU project, what would the biggest priority be? To a number of us, it seems that the priority would be to protect user's data and computing experience from the growing centralization of the web. Something like making distributed web applications, with p2p-distributed asymmetric cryptography replacing behind-the-firewall databases, and apps running in sandboxes on users' machines, in the context of their secrets, replacing e.g. facebook.com. Someone at the conference said it best: it seems that user freedom is really at odds with the client-server model of computation. The corrolary being that net neutrality is necessary but not sufficient -- we need to increase equality of all nodes in the net, including nodes that are now just "end users".
- wmf 17y ago
  http://autonomo.us/ http://autonomo.us/ has a lot of discussions of this topic.
  - wingo 17y ago
    Thanks for the link, looks like good ideas. I'll see what possible engagement there is there. The thing about the GNU project now -- speaking for myself, not for the project -- is that we have a few hundred really good hackers, and we're done making a Unix clone. We need something new. This kind of thing sounds like a good direction.
- xcombinator 17y ago
  A very good idea. Start growing an open source web platform.
  - wingo 17y ago
    "Open source" doesn't have much to do with it :) More substantially, "platform" usually implies centralization, even if your platform can federate. It's probably more useful to envision a radical solution (<i>to the root</i>), and start thinking about how to get there.
grandalf 17y ago
When I read the quote I wasn't sure which O'Reilly it was referring to.
leej 17y ago
Points Tim has got wrong: - Google and Amazon does not have the platform value as Apple or Facebook has! - This era is not different from PC era at all. He just does not want or have courage to say it: Google is the new Microsoft. It's doing the exact opposite (of MS) and still locks customers in. If you want free GPS then you MUST buy Android phone from THE carrier(s). Amazon is not on the Google level but if you want to buy (e-)book who would be your choice? Amazon, of course. Does this count as lock-in? Yes it does. - Microsoft and champion of open web? How will that be so?
- loup-vaillant 17y ago
  It may be so if they realize that the locking, this time, is not in their favour. Then, the only way to avoid death may be advocating an open internet, where lock-in is less likely.

133 points by lecha 17y ago

lecha 17y ago

"we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. " The argument makes a lot of sense, but why is Amazon in this list? It is true that Amazon is in the war for control. But that war is for control of the data center, not for control of the web.

allenp 17y ago
Amazon is looking for control of online retail as well, especially with their recent purchase of Zappos. I don't know how this fits in to a battle with the other contenders however.
- TheEarlyShow 17y ago
  I think the implication may be swaying over into the box store segment. Meaning, while they may not be battling other online entities, they are doing a lot of pushing against the online presence of several box retailers.
coderdude 17y ago
I would think Amazon deserves to be on that list more than Apple. Apple as a platform doesn't even make sense. What are they doing to become infrastucture for others to build upon, the app store? Amazon made cloud computing popular, did they not? Edit: My comment reads like I'm getting defensive for Amazon, and or bashing Apple. I'm not.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
why is Amazon in this list? Kindle, I suspect. Remember, this is being written by Tim O'Reilly, a person who has reason to know and care about the Kindle's position in the digital-text marketplace and the relative openness (or lack of openness) of the platform. I agree that Amazon Web Services doesn't seem to belong on this list. AWS is a powerful offering, but it's not as if Amazon has an exclusive lock on the Linux virtual server business. I believe that even their provisioning API is in the process of being cloned in open source.
- lecha 17y ago
  Ah yes, thanks. Kindle slipped my mind. It makes sense now. Kindle does have a potential to become a walled-garden ecosystem reminiscent to Apple. There's nothing Kindle wants more than to become an iPod of books and will very likely curb the Web experience on Kindle to suit its business needs.
rapind 17y ago
I would remove Facebook from that sentence, not Amazon. Amazon, Apple, and Google are three heavyweights with a slightly different focus and strengths, but who find themselves competing more and more often for a sort of internet consumer dominance. They compete at several platforms: 1. The storefront (iTunes and Amazon, Google's in there as search and recommendations). 2. The datacenter / cloud (AWS, MobileMe, Docs / Gmail / more to come from Google) 3. Mobile devices (iPhone + iPod, Android, Kindle) There are other companies competing in each of these areas of course, but these three companies really excel at taking over markets (very smart people running them) and it's going to be interesting to see them going head to head as they reach into each others core markets. Plus I think they'll destroy most other competitors in each of these areas as they battle it out.
- bjelkeman-again 17y ago
  Usually they say the future belongs to the kids. I see a lot of kids that live in Facebook these days. They don't read books, they don't buy music online, they don't care much for mail. Facebook definitely has a place among these three.
  - rapind 17y ago
    No doubt you're right. I guess it's just a generational thing. I hear Google, Amazon, iTunes, and I see immediate value. For some reason, even though I'm aware of all (or at least most) of the arguments that place value in Facebook / Twitter etc. I still wouldn't feel comfortable investing in it. I'm probably dating myself pretty badly, but they look fluffy to me.
jhancock 17y ago
kindle and streaming media. Amazon doesn't compete with iTunes/NetFlix yet, but they want to.

albertsun 17y ago

Fits in well with this recent story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 about it being time for personal servers. Just like I can run my own blog on my own server with Wordpress instead of needing to have it hosted on Wordpress.com, I wish someone would release an open source webmail client of equivalent quality to Gmail that could be installed on personal servers, would also support XMPP, etc. Same for other cloud software now. Why not offer it as an upfront purchase price, plus a continuing support contract, with the software running on hardware that the end user has ultimate control over.

jacquesm 17y ago
I use horde for webmail, I don't use XMPP but I think it is supported.
- xinsight 17y ago
  While Horde is an open-source email reader, it's not in the same league as gmail. Not even close.
  - e1ven 17y ago
    I've had decent experiences with Roundcube, if you're looking for a more AJAX-driven client; The versions I've tested were a bit buggy, but that was a few years back, I'm sure it's improved by now. http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/
- litewulf 17y ago
  Webmail is, I think, a substantially "easier" problem (with the caveat that this is mainly for technically proficient users) I use gmail for email hosting but it all routes through a domain I control, so if Google one day goes crazy, I can switch out of gmail. (And IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off), whereas things like my facebook friends are much harder to migrate.
  - pyre 17y ago

neovive 17y ago

Very interesting article. It's clear that large (non-interoperable) silos are forming across the various aspects of the web -- content, data and infrastructure. Developers should be concerned as this will bring us back to a time where we need to build 3-4 versions of everything. However, the industry changes fast and this competition may open up opportunities for smaller players to fulfill various needs.

TheEarlyShow 17y ago

It's one of the better articles that Tim has put out as of late. I still don't get the angst against Apple and their approach though. If you don't care for it, don't use it - what's the big deal? Apple has went out of its way to complete a infrastructure and effectively trained it's customers to make purchases in small amounts. From music and etc content, to anything in the App store. That's their ecosystem. In what other market can you go inside and and just start putting products on their shelf and that be ok? I mean, I'd _love_ to walk into Wal-Mart and put a whole stock of pull-my-finger novelty gifts in aisle 9. Sarcasm aside, I can't see how developers can bitch about an ecosystem that they're wanting to exploit. Otherwise they'd be building little j2me applications for the RAZR, or apart of the Blackberry ecosystem, or... . But every other day there's someone new on a blog griping about something they well and truly signed up for. Android is about to be out en mass with the upcoming phones, Blackberry already has a mass of phones. Teach those users to make purchases in an ecosystem that isn't going to be easy to do so and then leverage it. But to soapbox against Apple just doesn't make sense to me.

gaius 17y ago
He makes a bad analogy because 1) you never needed Microsoft's permission to develop a Windows app and 2) developers on Windows (very nearly) had the "write once, run anywhere" promise that Java still hasn't lived up to taken for granted. Plus there were very low barriers to entry for developers in the Windows world; anyone could knock something up in VB or Access and nearly anyone else could get it to work on their Windows PC with minimal effort. Try doing that on the 50 (100?) Linux distros out there...
- jacquesm 17y ago
  There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux distros without too much trouble: static linking. You'll still need to support 32 and 64 bits so it isn't completely painless but it's a lot better than trying to cope with all the flavours.
  - gaius 17y ago

protomyth 17y ago

I am a little confused when we talk about "The Web" and include applications for mobile devices. I am really more concerned with what HTML5 is capable of and how widely it is implemented. The iPhone, in my mind, is more like the XBox or PSP model of development.

olefoo 17y ago
Given that many of these walled garden technologies use web-content within applications (a lot of iphone apps are nothing more than site-specific browsers with minimal custom UI chrome), and that most of them restrict access to programmer and debugging tools (enforced by law on devices that promise DRM to content-providers). An iPhone, an XBox, a PSP or any other device that can serve as a general purpose computer but does not allow the end-user to do so is taking away freedom 0. You may be willing to make that choice in the short term, for this year's fad gadget, but will you want to be locked into it?

chris100 17y ago

It's a thought-provoking article. But I don't embrace the culture of free as much as Tim. If he gets his way, no company would be allowed to profit, everything would be open. Somehow, Google would be the only one to survive in the environment. Tim is not shocked that Google is giving away for free the GPS software and therefore killing the GPS device makers. It would be anti-dumping if software had a fixed cost, but it doesn't... Where is the fine-line between playing dirty and being a great contributor to free technologies? Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position. The thought-provoking part of the article is what Tim leaves out. What does an open world look like? Can the world be 100% open, or will there always be large companies fighting to control it? To me, it sounds a little bit utopian to hope or assume that 100% open is possible.

gloob 17y ago
Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position. And that's the difference: Microsoft had a monopolistic position. Open-source doesn't, so much. What's more, open-source isn't even an organization, so it doesn't even make semantic sense to say that it could have a monopolistic position. Google (specifically) is a different matter. If they become a monopoly, smack them down. It makes little difference to free/open-source software at large, though.

raintrees 17y ago

And meanwhile, the whole debate may get t-boned in the intersection by the banning of net neutrality. Only those (large?) partners that make deals with (large?) ISPs get their applications to work fast and smooth (if at all?). It seems we have several fronts to watch/defend...

access_denied 17y ago
There is not much industry organizations in IT. Small shops should found stuff.

wingo 17y ago

Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is, and re-found the GNU project, what would the biggest priority be? To a number of us, it seems that the priority would be to protect user's data and computing experience from the growing centralization of the web. Something like making distributed web applications, with p2p-distributed asymmetric cryptography replacing behind-the-firewall databases, and apps running in sandboxes on users' machines, in the context of their secrets, replacing e.g. facebook.com. Someone at the conference said it best: it seems that user freedom is really at odds with the client-server model of computation. The corrolary being that net neutrality is necessary but not sufficient -- we need to increase equality of all nodes in the net, including nodes that are now just "end users".

wmf 17y ago
http://autonomo.us/ http://autonomo.us/ has a lot of discussions of this topic.
- wingo 17y ago
  Thanks for the link, looks like good ideas. I'll see what possible engagement there is there. The thing about the GNU project now -- speaking for myself, not for the project -- is that we have a few hundred really good hackers, and we're done making a Unix clone. We need something new. This kind of thing sounds like a good direction.
xcombinator 17y ago
A very good idea. Start growing an open source web platform.
- wingo 17y ago
  "Open source" doesn't have much to do with it :) More substantially, "platform" usually implies centralization, even if your platform can federate. It's probably more useful to envision a radical solution (<i>to the root</i>), and start thinking about how to get there.

grandalf 17y ago

When I read the quote I wasn't sure which O'Reilly it was referring to.

leej 17y ago

Points Tim has got wrong: - Google and Amazon does not have the platform value as Apple or Facebook has! - This era is not different from PC era at all. He just does not want or have courage to say it: Google is the new Microsoft. It's doing the exact opposite (of MS) and still locks customers in. If you want free GPS then you MUST buy Android phone from THE carrier(s). Amazon is not on the Google level but if you want to buy (e-)book who would be your choice? Amazon, of course. Does this count as lock-in? Yes it does. - Microsoft and champion of open web? How will that be so?

loup-vaillant 17y ago
It may be so if they realize that the locking, this time, is not in their favour. Then, the only way to avoid death may be advocating an open internet, where lock-in is less likely.