Natural monopolies...not just a game

Tim O'Reilly had a wonderful post on the alternatives for Internet development from the 'small pieces loosely joined model' to the "One Ring to Rule them All".

Led by Apple and now Google's Android, we may be emerging from the 'One ring to rule them all' model of the PC-centric era. But that does not necessarily mean we stay in an open standard universe. It seems that for generation(s) computing has moved from one natural (or unnatural) monopoly to another. The Social Web may be no different as companies such as Facebook and GOOG can, in many ways, wall-off competition/innovation. This does not mean they will, but the potential is there and, if it produces a better (e.g. safer, more intuitive, more reliable) experience, history shows we will facilitate them doing it by choosing today's experience over tomorrow's potential.

Riding a wave

Google's Wave announcement, and wonderful post by Tim O'Reilly (here) feels like a leap towards parity between desktop and cloud based applications. Of equal import is the way Google is implementing via open protocol and open source. An implementation that, no doubt will continue, if not accelerate the downward pricing pressure on applications.

This is important stuff.

Check out the clip below...for my smart friend Larry who loves waves.

And now presenting...

I will be giving a presentation in a few weeks and went to two of my favorite sites that have emerged as vibrant repositories for all sorts of presentations.

I use Scribd and Slideshare as a portal to see what people have posted on the topic that I will be discussing. Great homework for presentations, and also a good way to keep up on happenings on conferences (where the organizer does not post for open viewing). For example, if you go to Slideshare, a search on the SXSW conference returns these six pages of presentations. Not all relative to the topic, but enough are to satisfy my direct needs, as well as spurring a search journey into other areas.

For example check out Tim O'Reilly's 2008 CIO exchange presentation here. It could use a bit of editing, but the content, concentrating on markets where technology seems to be in the early stages of being potentially disruptive is really strong.