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Segunda-feira, 12/5/2008 Live Mesh, by Steve Gillmor Julio Daio Borges Back in the good old days, big software companies did big things. Little companies tiptoed around in the shadow of the platform makers, gaining enough speed to liftoff and attract enough attention to survive long enough to be acquired. Like the old movie studios of the 30's and 40's, the technology studios of the 80's and 90's built stars and played them off until the inevitable decline. So it went with Microsoft, as the seeming invulnerability of Gates' machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation. Though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim not of decline but of lack of fuel — the very customers who created the megalith in the first place. Everything changed with the Net. The platform wars, the browser wars, the widget wars — they're all really battles in the grappling with the living, breathing, swarm that is the Web. Even the argument over whether Office is dead is bogus, a joke that became a conference that begat a series of endless reiterations of the first O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference known as Web 2.0. The stuff that went over the wire now goes over the air; the stuff that used to persist solely on the client now comes from G@d knows where in the Cloud. [...]So we grow to expect little of big companies, entrenched publishers, and the various gatekeepers that fester at the margins of this unruly beast of the Net. Google grew so fast we bought the laughable notion they weren't attacking Microsoft with freeware, but it only seemed like a big company play after the fact, and even today is laughed off by so-called "enterprise" seers as a toy, albeit a collaborative one that can't be duplicated by the incumbent without triggering self-destruction. Instead, we watch big company plays emerging from virtualized roots, the Amazon services, the social media clouds, the endless "little" company dance of instability, VC stupidity, and media carbonation of the Valley. This is the universe of the little Duchies, the Fenwicks where media storms roll down through the hills and tumble past with names like Twitter and Friendfeed and Twhirl. I'll call them microbigs, because the media treats them like they're big companies with little to lose and everything to gain. The microbigs can seem transcendent like Facebook or possessing the lifetime of a gnat like a thousand forgotten startups or neverwases, but nowhere are the range of possible outcomes more encapsulated than Twitter.[...] Steve Gillmor, sobre o futuro da Microsoft, no hoje imbatível TechCrunch. Julio Daio Borges |
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