Well, Searls and Weinberger have done it again, with a crisp essay on What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. If you haven't already seen it, go read and then come back.

I find almost nothing to disagree with, but I'll toss in my two cents on a couple of points. The first is the notion that the Internet is an agreement. True, but in fact one can be more specific and tie the idea to an analytic framework. The Internet is a platform defined by a set of consensus technical standards and service practices (the agreement), that have the economic role of reducing the specificity costs of transactions, and therefore enabling a marketplace with superior efficiency to either proprietary specifications, or vertically integrated models. As luck would have it, a few days ago I posted in my backfile some articles I had written on the topic of platforms for Electric Minds in 1997. Should you care to check it out, there's a elaboration on this topic here and in the related articles. It's written in terms of PCs and a world six years old, but the relationship should be clear.

One question asked in World of Ends is "If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?". Having been inside a few conference rooms where views have been aired or decisions made that in the light of hindsight would qualify, maybe I can make some suggestions beyond that it's the "antithesis of how governments and businesses view the world". In the words of N. Bonaparte, "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

I'd suggest one root of boneheadedness is false analogy, a reflexive grab for the business or technical vision with a simple story and a happy ending. I don't know how many times during the abortive 'interactive TV' times of the early '90s I heard a telco executive saying the equivalent of "The deal is that we get to eat Blockbuster's lunch." Never mind that Blockbusters's customers really weren't unhappy, and the technology tricks to deliver video were the most expensive and dicey in the house. We saw this one in the mid-90's too, from the content houses - "this is just like video and print, they've going to have to come to us to make a business of it." It takes several serious whacks with a 2x4 in the form of busted business models to break out of these mindsets.

The second repeating pattern is simply incredulity, coupled with some inertia. Many of the businesses smashed up when a platform turns into a market are specialists who have spend years tuning their offerings to a specific audience. The idea that their customers will turn away for a less optimized product with wider support takes a while to sink in. Anyone who lived through the extinctions of the specialty CAD station, AI machines, and graphics engines by commodity PCs will recognize this. So will the online services whose tuned client/server screen presentation protocols were rolled over by HTML, and the telcos who are still incredulous that their customers will settle for some lame best-efforts thing. Again, it takes a few 2x4 applications to break that world model.
7:07:51 PM