Everybody Has A Share

Free service and control

"If you're using someone else's service, for free, and expecting that you'll get control over everything then you're just not facing the practical reality of the situation." -- Phil Windley, January 2008

Bye-bye, Office

"The future of the desktop is not an online desktop. It's getting rid of the desktop metaphor altogether. The future of an office suite is to dump the office and focus where people spend their time: email, IM, SMS, blogs, etc. We increasingly collaborate as we create rather than create so that we can then collaborate on what we've already done." -- Matt Asay, November 2007

Irresistable vs. immovable

"The irresistible force is personalization...the immovable force is privacy." -- Bernard Lunn, October 2007

Lots of money to be made

"We're approaching a transition point in computing that most people don't understand. It isn't just the Internet or search or access to movies and music that matter, but all of those presented in a technological context that Just Plain Works. The importance of all our digital stuff along with our fear of losing it will shift us more and more toward central backup and storage. And once you have your life sitting on some company's server, are you going to move it on a whim? No, and that means there will be a LOT of money to be made providing these services. Storage and automated backup and probably some form of netboot with a fresh OS image every time is the future of computing whether we're talking about desktops or notebooks or mobile phones." -- Robert X. Cringely, October 2007

Even in tech, demand outstripping supply

"Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that demand has outstripped supply and has indeed shifted the equilibrium, but toward a more centralized compute model." -- Chris Marino, July 2007

Community = Strategic asset

"Big vendors are willing to trade the efforts of open source communities as if they were just strategic corporate assets." -- Gary Edwards, June 2007

The value of shared work

"Free software is part of a broader phenomenon, which is a shift toward recognizing the value of shared work." -- Mark Shuttleworth, June 2007

The hard problems

"The hard problems in the vision of a true web-as-platform involve all the usual hard computer science issues.  How can we normalize information from disparate sources to make it interoperable?  How do we get to a lingua franca without waiting for moribund standards (think CORBA and SOA)? How can we then manage the transition of legacy information and services into this world of interoperability?" -- Peter Rip, March 2007

Smart business

"A commitment to openness isn't compatible with the business model of any large publicly traded corporation, regardless of how cool its industrial designs may be. Opening up selective parts of your business is just smart business. Knowing when to keep them closed is also just smart business" -- Ed Bott, October 2006

Windows -- now with extra fat

"About 25 percent of the cost of a laptop is there just to support XP, which is like a person that has gotten so fat that they use most of their muscle to move their fat." -- Nicholas Negroponte, June 2006