Factory Factory

Trying to model these trust relationships in the computer is fraught with hubris and failure, but what we can do is associate information with people, and display the information form people we know, with their pictures (and names) next to it. Then, our brains can apply the subtle modelling of trust relationships that they have evolved to do so well.

Making faces bigger onscreen lets us blend the two modes of computation smoothly, and filter and understand the world better thorugh our nuanced understanding of trust.

If Google’s power over the web wanes, and I think it will in time, it will not likely be the result of Microsoft or someone else replacing it as the default search service. It will be because new default functions emerge that lessen the number of times we want to use the search function. 

So what does this mean for entrepreneurs and VCs? Well for one, don’t make a frontal assault on a default service. Build or finance a service that can become a new default function in the Internet operating system. And if you have a shot at becoming one of these default functions, invest all of your time and energy attaining and solidifying that default position before working on monetizing it. Because its a very tough position to secure and once you get there it’s pretty hard to knock you out.

Beyond the question of who will own the Internet operating system, there’s a question of what kind of operating system it will be.

I said earlier that the alpha geeks are comfortable with new tools, and good at combining them to get unexpected results. As commercial vendors make ordinary developers and end users comfortable with the facilities of the internet operating system, I hope they’ll also pay attention to “unexpected results.” You get these by creating an environment where innovation can flourish, where users can “scratch their own itch”, and combine the tools in new ways.

I like to think that it will have an open architecture similar to that of both Unix/Linux and the Internet.

Rather than building a single monolithic system, the original Unix inventors, Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie, developed some simple system services, and a powerful concept for how programs could cooperate. As a result, simple programs could be connected in a pipeline, like legos or tinker toys, to accomplish more complex tasks.

This same principle is evident in the development of the Internet. Open standards tell you what you need to write and what you need to read in order to be able to cooperate with another program. What you do internally is up to you.

This is fundamentally a loosely coupled architecture that lowers the barriers to entry to participation in the market, or if you like, in the ecosystem. Anyone can write a program, for his or own purposes, for his or her own small niche, that nonetheless magically becomes a part of the entire system.

The use of these so-called microformats allows the search engine to better understand the meaning of data and to employ it more intelligently.

The second day of the workshop had more discussion. We had some straw polls; of the 40 or so people there, around 8 said they wanted to work on the work Opera and Mozilla have been proposing recently, and about 11 said that not only did they not think it would be worth working on this, but they actively thought that the W3C should not work on it.

In my opinion that’s pretty short-sighted, but as Steven Pemberton pointed out, six year ago, the W3C decided that HTML was dead, and the way forward was a host of new languages (what is now XHTML2, XForms, MathML, SVG) that would lead the world’s population to a clean new world. So at least they are consistent. Of course I had to point out that six years ago, I was in school, which got a good laugh.

My point, though, was that times change. In the last six years we have seen that authors simply didn’t agree: Mozilla has supported MathML for years, but it is still very rare to see any MathML content on the Web. Mozilla, Opera and Safari all support XHTML1, in fact Mozilla has supported XHTML1 since before it had an assigned namespace and MIME type, but again the amount of application/xhtml+xml content on the Web is trivial.

The truth is that the real Web, the Web that authors write for, is the Windows IE6 Web. The only way to change that is to reduce the IE6 market share, and new technologies don’t do this. Marketing does. Once users are primarily using a browser that is being regularly updated, then we can start introducing radically new technologies. Until then, such technologies simply aren’t going to become popular

Sometimes privacy is at odds with innovation, and while we would never want to say that privacy is illegitimate - we’re not happy to see it shut down major potential avenues for innovation either.