23 Apr 2002
Tue, 23 Apr 2002
What could Microsoft learn from the web log community? Coopetition
Webloggers cooperate
Dave Winer used the word in an essay back in 1999. There are many examples of how webloggers cooperate to promote themselves, and blogging in general. There’s the I link to you, you link to me phenomenon in which a weblogger will return the favor of a link by linking back to the referrer. In the extreme, automatic referrer linking such as that practiced by Chris Wenham and others, demonstrates the concept on a grand scale. Bloggers also cooperate by developing software jointly. This is largely the model employed by open source developers though it tends to be focused around scripting and is not as seriously oriented toward methodology and CVS in blogspace. Webloggers support each other by responding when a weblogger puts out a call for help. Finally, birds of a feather flock together. A sense of community emerges where people help each other, in turn, promoting a sense of interdependency, not independency. Think about Microsoft in that context for a moment.
Webloggers compete
Blogspace represents a darwinistic information economy in which the survival of the fittest is determined by the ideas that each individual has to offer to the community. If what you have to offer is compelling, people will come. An attitude of humility helps and an attitude of humanity prevails. Bloggers can measure their progress on sites such as those hosted by Radio Community Server, Daypop, or Blogdex. The community will decide who rises to the top and who doesn’t. Cliques develop dynamically without the deeply rooted politics of social institutions such as schools or companies. People do change their minds, individually and collectively. Those cliques influence the rise and fall of new competitors in blogspace. The combination of cooperation and competition is coopetition and Microsoft could learn a lot from looking at the way social groups form, grow, and support each other in this environment. Clearly, Microsoft has a vested interest in protecting it’s relationships with VARs and ISVs but just as clear is the fact that there is considerable dissension among those groups as to what Microsoft’s current position is and what it should be.
Coopetition in Microsoft
Specific business units within Microsoft appear to have tendencies toward coopetition - MSDN, for instance. However, the underlying motivation (complete and total domination) destroys the spirit of coopetition. Example: I’m an independent developer, I use Microsoft tools at work, but when I upgrade my tools, I have to upgrade my web browser. First, this is not coopetition. This is market manipulation and is one of the primary reasons why the company is in court in the first place. Second, this violates at least one of the design principles that Microsoft would seem to espouse – namely, orthogonality. In the end, if webloggers behaved like Microsoft, Dave Winer would have launched a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack against my site when I got more than a hundred unique visitors a day. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Posted at: 23:00 | permalink
Thanks for the memories
Tony Bowden's got some interesting commentary on a variety of topics.
Barbelith has some interesting thoughts on the Google API.
e7l3 has some interesting comments on linux and vmware.
Why memories? Well, I had this thought that blogspace is really the collective consciousness of the tech world. The internet is the neuron and each blogger is a synapse and blog software is the neurotransmitting chemical soup. When the synapses fire in harmony, everybody tells 2 friends and you have a collective memory that can persist forever if we are careful. Just a thought.
Posted at: 20:47 | permalink
Driving to the store with an OS running your car
It's been ten years since I first saw this but even now, it still makes me laugh hysterically. I believe I originally saw it in a column by Peter Coffee in PC Week but that's just a guess. I wish I knew the identity of the real author.
Posted at: 20:29 | permalink
Google Oddities Go On
I have fallen almost completely off of google today for some reason. Now, when you search on "david watson", my site doesn't appear anywhere. It's mind boggling. There must be some bugs in the cache updating or something. Previous searches that returned near google whack results, now return nothing, or really old pages. Can somebody explain this?
Posted at: 10:06 | permalink
New Release of Swingin' Google!
Added support for launching external browsers, spelling interface, JDK 1.3 (Mac OS X), fixed hyperlinks.
Get it here.
Posted at: 10:03 | permalink
