Google recognized that users maintain control, and to win they had to become users’ preferred choice.
....The Web’s lesson is that we have to let go, to exert as little control as necessary. What are the fewest necessary rules that we can provide to shape the experience? Where do people, tools, and content come together? How do we let go in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to our business?
Peter Merholz, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control," Adaptive Path, 21 Jun 2005
On any given Web page, users will either...
- click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal,
- or click the Back button on their Web browser.
Mark Hurst, "The Page Paradigm," Good Experience Blog, 19 Feb 2004.
People don’t complain about paper when it can’t do something, but if software can’t do something then it’s “bad” or “useless” or “a waste” or “needs more features” or “crap” (yes, we’ve heard all of these things). That’s an impossible expectation to meet and a harmful assumption to make.
Jason Fried, "The right tool for the job," Signal vs. Noise Blog, 23 May 2005.
“There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.” - Ansel Adams
“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” - George Sand (1804-1876), Pearls of Wisdomed. J. Agel and W. Glanze, 1987
"The fire service in the United States is a 200-year-old institution unimpeded by progress..."
Paniccia's team came up with an answer that was both brilliant and, for those familiar with silicon technology, conceptually simple. Etched into the Intel laser chip was a silicon waveguide channel in which light bounced back and forth, gaining in intensity. The researchers implanted electrodes on both sides of the channel. When they turned on a voltage between the electrodes, it created an electric field that herded the negatively charged electrons toward the positively charged electrode, effectively sweeping them out of the way. As a result, the photons were able to build up unhampered, until they produced a continuous laser beam.
Robert Service, "Intel's Breakthrough," MIT Technology Review, July 2005
IBM wants to harness the power of this community, allowing members to work together in hardware, software and tuning, sharing the resulting breakthroughs. As with Linux IBM is looking to build service revenues here, in this case design and manufacturing service revenues.
I have said before that IBM is the leader in monetizing the open source model. But open source should not be confused with Linux. It's a business process, not an operating system, in which innovations are shared from a common pool, and costs are spread out among many different companies.
The short form. It's not communism, it's a co-op.
As hardware becomes software, and as Moore's Second Law bites, the open source business model is moving into the vacuum.
Dana Blankenhorn, "Could Apple loss be IBM's gain?" ZDNet Open Source Blog, 9 Jun 2005.