25 Nov 1998
Copyright, 1998, Max K. Goff, all rights reserved
Consolidate. To join together into one whole. To unite. To make firm or secure. To strengthen. The process of consolidation in technology and business flows, complex cycle interleaved with and within other complex cycles. We study the phenomenon we observe in business school and engineering seminars, and we temper it all with law and commerce, and we feel secure, though none of us truly knows the impact or magnitude of change our activities will yet yield.
Many events over the past few days bear comment. The court's grant for a preliminary injunction against Microsoft to fix it's Java implementation -- the AOL, Netscape, Sun deal and the recent Microsoft announcement regarding games for holiday shoppers for their Windows systems. The relationship between these announcements might be interesting to ponder, from the perspective of larger changes that may be unfolding.
The Java win was a water-shed event. With Windows compliance to the Java standard, Java developers can finally start to actually see a write once, run anywhere platform that works consistently across architectures. The consolidation of independent software vendors to the Java platform will be unstoppable, as the business case for Java to the developer was always hampered by Windows and is now much more compelling than any other approach.
The AOL deal also enhances Java's position and represents a huge opportunity for Sun. The consolidation of the portal community around AOL and Netscape should prove to be dominant. Portals are the entry point to the internet and as such emerge as one of the key positions in the spread of information. With 70% market share, the space has been claimed by AOL.
The consolidation around WIndows as the premier games platform on the planet, based on quantity and quality of available products, represents the key technical strength of Microsoft. Microsoft is a great platform for games. Let that be. Let Microsoft provide the cartoon interface for the web. But by playing fair and competing, based on open protocols and an open development platform, shared by a community.....that is consolidating around the planet.
And that's the key point. Consolidation. There is an emerging global culture that would embrace us all, and it is different from any we've previously experienced. The information driven new economy wants to make very valuable things free and ubiquitous, for self-serving reasons, to be sure. But nonetheless free. As other economies become more competitive due to the adoption of free technologies, more and more things will become free or nearly free. All for individual, self-serving reasons.
And maybe that's the larger force behind all of this. Maybe we're growing up as a species. Maybe we're getting it in the collective unconscious, and rising a step up in Mazlo's hierarchy of needs and we're manifesting a world in which poverty is simply an individual choice and not an inevitability. Where information has improved processes so much that virtually all basic creature comforts are free or nearly free. Where learning, service, and ambition are still rewarded and the rights of individuals worldwide are celebrated. Such a world could be the connected world that is emerging in these last days of this incredible century. And these business/technology/legal consolidations that we witness form the soil from which that world will grow in the next century.
The Thanksgiving Holiday is tomorrow.....
