I thought I’d continue with the theme of the internet as a complex adaptive and open platform, and use this post to share a number of stories on how people are using the internet in amazing ways:

The internet is a treasure trove of incredible empowerment. In April last year, I read about a boy, whose brother was working as a sweeper on India’s trains, who got lost and separated from his mother in 1986, when he was five. He found her. A quarter of a century later. Using Google Earth. Did the designers of the internet, the Web, Google Earth or the device used actually plan for this eventuality? That someone would retrace twenty-five-year-old steps to reconnect with a parent? No. But that’s not important. What’s important is that the internet could be used this way. That the Web could be used this way. That Google Earth could be used this way. And that the device could be used this way.

More recently I read that someone designed an app that used location/checkin data, in this instance from Foursquare, to help direct blind people. Now that’s augmented reality. Reality augmented by crowdsourced data overlaid on an open platform. Would the app have been perfect? No. Will this particular app succeed? Who knows? Not material. What matters is that the internet could be used this way, that GPS could be used this way, that Foursquare could be used this way. None of these things came for free. None of them needed to be designed this way. It happened because the people involved had a vision. A vision to do good.

A year ago, I read about someone who was checking in on her pet remotely, via the web, and found herself observing a burglar in her home. They caught the burglar.

A week or two ago, I took my family on vacation to a remote island. I didn’t realise how remote it was. We had to land at one of the larger islands in the group, and then take a small propellor-plane for 20 minutes. It wasn’t that simple. The BA flight arrived an hour late. We rushed, got on to the hopper plane, taxied and waited for clearance to take off. Not forthcoming. Why? The control tower hadn’t been able to raise anyone at the remote island airport to confirm that the lights would be kept on until after we landed. The pilot told me I’d better get hotels organised for the family and then fly the next day. I wasn’t having any of that, too much of a palaver. So I did the usual thing. Googled civil aviation at the remote island. Got a number. Called it. When someone picked up, passed the phone to the pilot. And then proceeded to negotiate a small fee for their keeping the airport open until after we landed. Simple ubiquitous connectivity, a browser, a search engine, people prepared to be flexible, and Robert is your parent’s sibling.

Just today, following my The Internet Contrives post yesterday, an old colleague and friend alerted me about something he knew I’d like. A tiny gadget that you slip into your luggage that then lets you track that piece of baggage with your smartphone. It even sends you a message when it comes into short range, so that you “know” when your bag is coming up the carousel.

There’s so much happening, so much that will gain quantum energy when the invention enters connected space. Organ printers. Drug printers. Movements small and large. Bluetooth stickers. Slinky on a treadmill.

Who could imagine such things?

Someone did.

All this was possible only because some people imagined a world where all this was possible. Because they designed things in a way that social, common good could come out of it.

My personal thanks to all those people, those that imagined the internet and the Web and GPS and so much we take for granted. People like Vint Cerf and Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine working on RFC 675. People like David P Reed and his work on TCP/IP and UDP. People like Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. People who saw how open adaptive platforms, that helped provide compute, storage and communications access, could form a foundation that can change the world.

Everything is getting disrupted. Everywhere. Our personal lives and our public lives. Businesses and homes, our education, our health. The way we entertain ourselves. Our work and our play. Even government.

Everything.

Because people had the vision to build open platforms.

 

 

 

In a little border town, it doesn’t matter where, there once lived a man. He crossed the border every day, like clockwork. Each morning the guards would see him wend his way to them, pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure. And each morning, like clockwork, they would put gloves on and sift through the manure. And find nothing. Each morning they would, reluctantly, let him cross. And each evening he would return.

This carried on for decades. They were sure he was smuggling something. But they couldn’t, for the life of them, figure out what. And then one day it was all over. He retired. Hung up his boots. Told them he was calling it a day. And they never saw him again.

Except that this isn’t a real story. So a few weeks later they did see him. He went to say hello. And over a warm cup of tea the guards begged him to tell them what he was really up to, what he’d been smuggling. He smiled at them and said “Wheelbarrows”.

For the past few weeks I’ve been putting forth the idea that 2013 is the Year of the Platform. Particularly the open adaptive platform, modelled upon the mother of all such platforms, the internet.

Yesterday I spent some time explaining why I continue to be optimistic about the internet. It went something like this. More and more people are getting connected to the internet every day. Devices are getting smarter. Costs are going down, availability’s going up. We’ve moved past post and telegraph and radio and TV to everything multimedia. Open source software is now in use everywhere and in everything. Open source hardware is now an affordable reality. And open source specifications are now a force to be reckoned with, as 3D printers head towards affordability. As Steven Johnson reminds us in his book “Future Perfect”, the world as we know will just come to a juddering halt if everything open source disappeared overnight.

And there’s a lot of magic happening as a result. As I said yesterday, everything’s getting disrupted. Everywhere. All the time.

Yet people remain concerned. And rightly so. Because disruptions affect the status quo.

And affecting the status quo just won’t do. Not if you’re a powerful incumbent. So there’s a lot of SOPAing and PIPAing that’s still to come, some ACTAing out, some real WCIT deeds.

During the financial crisis we started hearing that some banks were “too big to fail”. Having observed events in technology for the past thirty-odd years, I’ve realised that some of the incumbents really think they’re “too big to change”, and that they can use their market muscle and lobbying power to put the changes off indefinitely.

They’re wrong.

The internet really does route around obstacles.

The internet contrives.

When I lived in India, I used to marvel at just how the local car mechanics would keep vehicles in working order, usually with no access to spares, often with no access to documentation. They contrived.

The Maker Generation is here to stay. Armed with connectivity and smart devices. Able to use open source software and hardware, open specifications and open data. Able to contrive.

Human beings can do incredible things when they’re given the opportunity and the tools.

Let’s take communications. Do you remember a time before Skype? A time when you needed a mortgage to make a long-distance call? I’m old that way. I do remember those times. People in India needed to make international calls without having to enter some form of bankruptcy. So what did they do? They made person-to-person international calls, then referred to as PP calls. When you made a PP call, the operator would call the other number, ask for the person, and only put you through if the person you were calling was present to take the call. If the other person wasn’t there, then you weren’t put through, and there was no charge.

So what did many Indians do? Simple. They contrived. They used the name-space for the called party to send messages. So you’d call your son, visiting friends a zillion miles away, but instead of asking for him by name, you’d use the space to get a message to him. A call for Dartmouth Smith meant that the boy Smith had received a scholarship place at Dartmouth. And so on and so forth. Today it doesn’t matter any more, international calls are affordable to most places.

More recently, the same thing happened with mobile phones. Prices were too high. So what did people do, in India, in Africa, even in parts of China? They “gave someone a missed call”. Called, and then hung up the phone before the calling party answered. A painless way of letting the other party know to call back. The Missed Call feature had been subverted to make it possible to get over the affordability barrier.

It’s not just about affordability. Connected people with access to tools do the strangest things. Like using Product Reviews to pen literature, satire, humour. Or adopting digital conventions into everyday speech. [I’m still getting over my then 13-year-old daughter looking at me and appending something she said with “hashtag justsayin”.]

People will contrive. The internet will route around obstacles. And every now and then I will share the stories. Feel free to add to that store here, let others know of the routing-around-obstacles stories you’ve come across.

 

 

 

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel like I’m a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.

 

 

Remember the song Woodstock? I first heard the Matthews Southern Comfort version, then soon after that the Crosby Stills Nash and Young one, and shortly after that Joni’s original. I must have been all of 13. And today, forty-odd years later, it is still one of the defining songs of that time for me, perhaps even the defining one. Along with everything else that characterised those just-landed-on the Moon times, it made the teenager that was me believe that the world could and would be a better place. That people were essentially good. That we were social people. That sharing was good. That working together good would happen. That, over time, poverty and hunger and war and disease could all be solved, as humans worked together and applied their collective intelligence.

 

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

 

Those were the days. Imagine. [I could probably write the rest of this post trying to string together a series of songs from that era, but I’m going to resist the temptation.] Instead, I’m going to segue over to the Grateful Dead, an ever-growing influence on me in those days. I was very taken with the idea that the band seemed to on the road all the time, that they were always in concert, that for them music was really a performance art. Beyond that, I was entranced by their treating their music somewhat like traditional jazz or for that matter classical Indian music, with regular extemporaneous experimention on a series of themes. And then there was the Tapers Section.

 

Grateful Dead Tapers Section

 

Reading about the Grateful Dead and hearing them, and later on even getting the chance to watch them perform live a few times, I began to understand what Jerry Garcia meant when he said “Once we’re done with it, the audience can have it”. They really saw music as a performance art; more than that, they saw music as culture, alive and vibrant in community. End of segue. [Almost.]

As I grew older, and as the power of the internet unfolded before me, I became convinced that much of what I dreamt of would become possible as a result of that platform. And my love affair with the internet became a commitment for life. Incidentally, take a look at the tabs at the Internet Archive: and then figure out for yourself why the Grateful Dead have a tab all to themselves. [OK, now that’s the end of the segue.]

So, the internet as a platform. I began to believe in it. Reading stuff like the Whole Earth Review and slowly seeing what was happening at the WELL, I began to believe even more. And then came the Web. And mobility. And everything else.

Decades later, I was still that person. I still believed that ubiquitous, affordable connectivity, compute power and storage would help transform all our lives, would improve our ability to learn and educate ourselves, would help us become healthier, would help us live better lives. That is why I wrote Building Society For the 21st Century as the kernel for this blog when I first went public with it.

Today, in 2013, I am still that person.

Today, there are many reasons to be disconsolate. Poverty and hunger are still not history, even though we have enough collectively. Diseases that had been eradicated seem to be making a comeback. Wars have morphed into interminable guerilla engagements with no end in sight. The global economy’s a mess with growth hard to find. Governments seem powerless: democratic ones are largely two-party states with each party hell-bent on destroying the other, rather than serve their citizens; autocratic ones seem hell-bent on retaining power at any cost, including genocide. Millions of children are out of school and hundreds of millions of youth are unemployed. Climate and energy and water and natural resource problems continue to proliferate with no end in sight. Many reasons to be disconsolate.

And yet, today I am still that person, believing in a better world, believing for a better world. A world where enfranchised connected people can work together to make a difference to their education, their health, their welfare, their environment, their government, everything. People with the ability and the freedom to make a difference, to make a dent in their particular part of the universe.

So I thought I’d take a quick look on how we’re doing in terms of being enfranchised and empowered and connected.

Our ability to get connected. The internet. Nearly 2.5 billion people connected, out of the 7 billion or so. 44% of the connected people are now in Asia. A long way to go, but the trend is in the right direction, with millions being added regularly.

 

Our ability to do something with that connection: devices, smart and otherwise. Around 5 billion mobile phones in circulation, with a billion of them smartphone users.

 

 

 

Taken from 2012 KPCB Internet Trends

 

Our ability to do something with that connection: switching away from the scarcity-bound desktop PC/landline world to the mobile device/wireless world:

 

Taken from 2012 KPCB Internet Trends

 

Our ability to build our own devices. Raspberry Pi passes a million. How to build a mobile network basestation using Raspberry Pi.

Our ability to build our own anything. Portable open source 3D printers. The Global Village Construction Set.

Our ability to repair many things, substitute many things. Fixing the future with Sugru.

Our ability to mash all this up and use open platforms to do even more amazing things, some simple, some complex. How Arduino, open source and 3D printing are changing speaker design. Physical social networking with the Good Night Lamp.

The list is endless. Open courseware and MOOCs are now to be taken seriously. Open data is gathering momentum. Open architectures are beginning to pervade publishing, healthcare, even government.

Everything is getting disrupted.

Everything.

Not just for Arabs, and not just at Springtime.

Everything. All the time.

With everyone connected and able to express themselves and to share with each other, the tools of past times are ill suited to serve us. So there’s a lot of pressure on legal and regulatory systems to do with many things: patents, copyright, trademarks, banking and finance, communications, computing, journalism, personal information, freedom of expression, you name it. And all these things tend to get further complicated as the very concept of nation comes under pressure, with Cyrano de Bergerac and Obelix going Russian. People and companies move to where the tax sun don’t shine.

 

Of course powerful incumbents are discombobulated by all this. Dinosaurs were designed for discombobulation.

And of course they try and fight the changes in every way. SOPA. PIPA. ACTA. WCIT. Look where it’s got them. As I’ve said before, it’s over.

Powerful incumbents like being in control, which means predicting the future by preventing it.

But you know what?

I feel/just like a cog/in something turning.

A coda: I learnt, while writing this post, about the tragic death of Aaron Swartz. Do read Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig’s obituaries of Aaron. A sad day.

Coda 2: Here is the official statement from Aaron’s family and partner. Do read it.

A sad day.

But the future will not be prevented.

 

 

Introduction

I signed off last year with a couple of posts asserting that 2013 was going to be The Year of the Platform. So I thought it behooves me to get this year started with the same message.

When I speak of platforms, I tend to speak of open adaptive constructs that allow people to layer value around and “on top of” the foundation. As stated before, platforms come in many forms, shapes and sizes. A closed platform is likely to evince linear growth at best, as postulated in Sarnoff’s Law. More open platforms are capable of supporting geometric or exponential growth, initially quadratic, as in Metcalfe’s Law, and then tending towards exponent values greater than 2, as in Reed’s Law. The principle is the same: the more open the platform is, the more likely it is that relationships and interactions between platform participants will create new and differentiated value.

I am not an expert on platforms; at best I’m a passionate amateur. If you want to dig deep into open adaptive platforms you should start with the internet and with the Web, what Tim O’Reilly called The Architecture of Participation. So you should delve into the writings of people like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee; understand the thinking of people like George Gilder, Bob Metcalfe, David Reed, Andrew Odlyzko; get into the books of people like Richard Schmalensee and David Evans. Maybe even read the comments to this post, there may be some good pointers there.

Enough scene-setting. Here are my initial thoughts on platforms and sharing. Have at them, let me have your comments and views and criticisms, let’s all learn in the process.

 

Platforms create value by enabling social interactions between participants

The simplest way that platforms enable sharing is by helping people communicate with each other. The traditional post and telegraph companies, forerunners to the modern telcos, are classic communications platforms. All you need is a directory, some way to look up who’s there. If possible, you can reduce the cost of searching through the directory by grouping/sorting, in alphabetical, regional, functional, whatever. When directories were analog this was very important, but now with digital search capabilities this is less so. Nevertheless, the ability to form groups and to have those groups discoverable is important.

Telco 1.0 was about enabling primarily voice-based means of communications (though telegraph played a part for a while). Directory updates were analog and annual, grouping capabilities only available to the directory publisher. Telco 2.0, led by Microsoft, added e-mail to the functionality, and with that form of messaging allowed the scheduling of events to become reality. Telco 3.0, led by Facebook, made all this real-time, available as a feed, and with exposure of APIs to make it a real platform.

Once you have a platform that allows simple social interaction, the next simple thing is to enable sharing of digital things. Photographs. Documents. Music. Film. Blog posts. Smaller blog posts. Micro blog posts. No surprise why we all spent time going through all this, with the consequent impact on traditional analog intellectual property structures.

The value was not just in the sharing of the digital object per se, but in making that object “social”, as people like Jyri Engestrom reminded us. By allowing people to participate, new forms of value emerged. Everything could be tagged: folksonomies emerged, new ontologies and taxonomies could be formed, more flexible and more adaptive than their predecessors. Discovery of the object became easier.

It went beyond the tagging and labelling. Everything could be rated or reviewed. In fact even the rater or reviewer could be rated or reviewed.  So the next stage of value came from participant ratings (as in eBay) reviews (as in Amazon) comments (as in blog posts).

There was an obvious next step: lists. Top 5s, top 10s, favourites, whatever. So that became the next basis for adding social value.

And then of course you needed a way to share the tags, the comments, the reviews, the ratings, the lists, with a larger group of people. So we saw more ways of publishing come to the fore, with Tumblr and Twitter. But unlike the past, the growth in participants did not need to arrive at spam. Because these new publish mechanisms came with new subscribe mechanisms. Pub-sub was here to stay.

All that was phase 1: the sharing of digital objects, the facility for participants to enhance those objects with comments and feedback, and the capacity to publish or distribute the enhanced objects.

From that point platforms have continued to evolve in at least two ways: allowing people to build platforms themselves (by exposing infrastructure and software and data as services); moving to engaging with analog objects, not just digital (where now only the icons and labels of the shareable things were shared within the electronic community). Sharing physical inventory became valuable, with recent examples like Mealku and FlightCar as part of a category that includes kiva, airbnb and for that matter Mechanical Turk; they’re all exchanges where one person’s excess meets another’s scarcity, for a small fee. Sharing applications built on top of the platform is another step, which means the platform needs to offer APIs and some form of app store. WordPress, Discogs, Etsy, Minecraft, these are all examples of communities that can be built with APIs and apps.

 

Sharing also creates value by reducing waste: the growth of the 21st century scavenger

I want to emphasise this by sharing some recent examples that came across my radar screen, examples that excited me a lot : Mealku, which came to me via Jerry Michalski, and FlightCar, which came to me, I think, via Pat Phelan. I think of the two as identical. With Mealku, you get a chance to do what the New York Times called “making reservations for leftovers”: you have an excess of food prepared at home, and the platform allows you to get rid of that excess meaningfully. With FlightCar, you lend your car to others while it would normally have been parked at the airport waiting for your return, and they return it in time for you. I think Doc Searls will love it, it is so VRM. [Incidentally, I mentioned Jerry and Pat for a reason: they’re perfect examples of how “social” improves filtering. They knew me, knew what I would be interested in, and were connected to me in ways that allowed them to share the information simply and meaningfully. Pat lives in a different country, hundreds of miles from me, but in the same timezone; Jerry lives eight timezones away. I’ve known both for years. We see each other reasonably often, but our primary interactions tend to be digital.]

Resource scarcity is a reality for us now. We’re already facing challenges with energy, water and minerals, and there’s more to come. Reducing waste is no longer a nice-to-have option. So services that allow us to match one person’s excess with another’s shortage are going to become more and more important. When I was a child in India I remember being told that every day, the USA throws out enough food to feed Canada. I have no idea whether that’s true, I haven’t been able to verify it. But anecdotally it appears to make sense.

There’s a lot of research that’s already been done on how scavengers and rag-and-bone men and their ilk were part and parcel of city ecosystems in the past. Those were all about physical cities, bounded by physical spaces. Now those constraints have gone, with a new dimension of freedom added: the concept of renting scavengeable inventory. Borrow my car while it’s in the car park. Eat my leftovers. It’s an exciting area, disrupting many markets, and allowing for new forms of intermediary to form and thrive.

 

All this sharing creates Big, Small and Open Data

Big Data is by itself nothing new. We’ve had distributed devices for decades, collecting transactional information, and allowing for pattern analysis through aggregation and visualisation. The credit card is a classic example.

As we moved from small numbers of dumb devices to somewhat larger numbers of smart devices, the changes that took place were at least twofold. One, we moved from transactions to conversations and activity streams to intention signals: the “tense” of the activity stream moved from past to present to future-as-well-as-past-and-present. And two, this information came wrapped in metadata about time and place and actor and anything else the sensor could “lay hands on”: altitude, temperature, rainfall, friends present, devices used, ambient conditions, whatever.

There was a third change, a material change. We started involving people by connecting them. A whole new world, no longer machine to machine. Lots of data. Lots and lots of data. You’ve heard the similes. They go something like “In year X the world had a total of Y data. Today we add that in two days.”

What’s important is that we understand that there are at least three types of data from a platform perspective. Aggregated forms that allow us to act as groups or be understood as acting in groups. Drilled down forms that allow us to act as individuals, or to be understood as acting individually. And conventions, definitions, labels, part numbers, classifications that allow us to have meaningful aggregations or drilldowns.

Both Big Data as well as Small Data come in open and closed forms.

We understand the value of the Big and the Small, but we have only just begun to scratch the surface of the Open. [And that’s something I will dwell on in later posts].

 

Machines filter. It takes a human to curate

By now most of you have probably come across the kind of problems of an algorithm-driven world. If you haven’t done so already, check out Kevin Slavin’s TED talk on the subject. Similarly, you’ve probably understood most of what is there to understand about the benefits and risks of filter bubbles. If you haven’t done so already, you should hear Eli Pariser’s TED talk on the subject. And speaking of TED talks, I guess my whole philosophy about all this can be understood in what Sugata Mitra had to say, also in a TED talk, this time on education.

Mitra said “A teacher who can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer”.

So it is with all of us in all our walks of life, as knowledge workers or traffic wardens or surgeons or rocket scientists. There are things that we do that can be replaced by computers. And they should.

And then there are things that can’t be replaced by computers. Those are the things we should concentrate on.

Technology is best when serving us, when our actions are augmented by the tools.

 

The enterprise context: everything starts with the customer

If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you probably know I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the enterprise, and about how information lives within and beyond the enterprise.

Open adaptive platforms, underpinned by robust social networks, aided and abetted by strong analytical capabilities, are here to stay. They’re some of the reasons I joined salesforce.com in 2010, convinced by the importance of the multitenant model, the platform and Chatter.

The traditional lock-ins for customers have disappeared in most markets, making the loyal customer a scarcity. Understanding customer engagement has become an imperative. Not just how the company engages with the customer. But, more importantly, how the customer engages with the company or companies. So it is no surprise that the focus on investment has moved from traditional back-off systems to “front-office”.

But there is a subtler change. Customers are also investing in “systems”, platforms that simplify their engagement with the business world at large. How they identify themselves (login, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). How they share their personal information. Who their friends and advisors and recommenders are. What devices they’d like to use. How they’d like to pay. Their preferences in terms of devices, approach to contracting (no contract versus term, prepaid, pay monthly, the lot), approach to payment (card, PayPal, Square, Amazon Payments, etc).

Those “systems” are often based on services provided by platforms, and companies must now build services that take those systems and services into account.

When you start thinking from the customer perspective, it all starts with C2B. It may look like C2B but often it turns out to be C2B2B2B2B. Soon it may start looking like C2C2C2B2B2B2B.

Platforms. Open, adaptive.

2013. The Year of the Platform.

 

 

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. And then you win.

That’s one of my all-time favourite Mahatma Gandhi quotes. [But it doesn’t displace the No 1: When asked what he thought about Western civilisation, Gandhi replied “I think it would be a good idea”].

Whenever I think about paradigm shifts, particularly in the context of those influenced by technological advances, the Gandhi quote comes to mind. Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma covers some of the relevant ground, but doesn’t evoke the emotional dimension quite as succinctly as Gandhi does.

We’ve been in the midst of a massive change in paradigm for some decades now, what John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison referred to as The Big Shift. Driven by continued and continuing advances in digital infrastructure, and augmented by liberalisation in public policy, businesses now operate in markets where competitive intensity is increasing, where barriers to entry are reducing sharply, where margins are hard to sustain.

There are many ways to characterise the shifts taking place. Hierarchies to networks. Stocks to flows. Centralised to distributed. Broadcast to peer-driven. One-way to two-way. Command and control to community.

These shifts, in turn, create the beginnings of other, more complex shifts. Markets affected by the Big Shift tend to move to the extremes of hyper global/low touch or hyper local/high touch; the middle ground becomes hard to hold, whether in terms of size or scope.

Industries that relied on “national” boundaries find this very hard to deal with. It is therefore no surprise that media, entertainment, telecoms, banks and airlines, amongst others, feel like they have been caught in a crossfire for a very long time.

There’s a good reason for them to feel that way. A simple reason.

They have been caught in a crossfire. Between hyper global and hyper local.

My friend and colleague, Sean Park, has written about this for some time now, about the effect of digital markets on business. [If you want to learn more about it, you should visit his blog The Park Paradigm. It is also very instructive to read Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital to get a related perspective]. That will be the subject of a different post, probably sometime in January 2013.

In this post, I wanted to concentrate on the subject of platforms. A few days ago, I suggested that 2013 will be the Year of the Platform. Today I want to spend a little more time explaining why.

Connectivity is becoming ubiquitous and affordable, as is access to compute power and storage. Smart mobile devices are everywhere and allowing everyone to connect to everyone else, allowing everything to connect to everything else. Soon it won’t just be our phones that have SIM cards and GPS: so will our pets, our pots and our pans.

The communities that are formed by such connections create new market opportunities. In the past, such opportunities were only accessible to those with the right background, the right connections, the right education, the right socio-economic status, perhaps even the right lineage. Those barriers are weakening day by day as the internet, the web and smart devices are enfranchising billions in new ways. And not surprisingly, those whose power came from the protection afforded by those barriers are seeking to use the remnants of that power to delay the inevitable. That’s why, nearly a year ago, I wrote about why I was so pleased to see SOPA and PIPA and ACTA come and go…. They were so clearly acts of desperation, with unintended benefits…. They helped wake people up, helped educate them about what was at stake.

What we saw last month at WCIT in Dubai had similar characteristics: desperate actions by those who saw their power being eroded, a protest movement in response, publicity about what was going on, education of the man and woman on the street, and ultimately failure of the intended action.

We’re going to see more of this cycle in 2013. Even dinosaurs learn to dance. But the desperate dances are not going to be the main event of 2013.

Because the main actors of 2013 are people similar to you and me, yet subtly different. People who for the first time will be enjoying the power of ubiquitous affordable connectivity, compute power and storage. People enjoying this power wherever they are, whenever they want to, for whatever they like.

That power creates opportunities for people to build markets and communities; this has already
been happening for decades now, but we’re going to see this trend accelerate in 2013.

As more and more people find new ways to connect with each other, they find new ways to create value for each other.

For each other. Important words. I will come back to them.

These new ways to connect and to create value in turn create opportunities for others, to build tools that help people do this.

Platforms.

Platforms come in many shapes and sizes, guises and disguises. A credit card is a platform. So is a car. A mobile phone is a platform. So is the Web. Communities and fora like the World Economic Forum and TED are platforms. So are political parties. An airport is a platform, so is a newspaper.

Platform. A term that means so many things to so many people. Yet when you look at platforms from a digital perspective, some common elements emerge:

Platforms are open. Of course some platforms are more open than others, as barriers to entry are retained, often by incumbents, often, sadly, with the assistance, sometimes even connivance, of regulators. Incumbents tend to have considerable financial power until they cease to exist.

Open means open to competition. Open means allowing participation by all. And this has implications on standards, on prices, on prerequisites, on the cost of entry and the cost of exit.

Platforms are adaptive to the environment. They’re elastic, allowing participants to scale both up as well as down. They’re responsive to change: cost of change is as important a measure as unit cost in a market where change is a constant. Adaptation and scaling take place at speed, allowing creativity to operate at the pace of the market, not the incumbent.

Platforms enable ecosystems. They are “multi-sided” like exchanges and marketplaces, focused on simplifying interactions between participants.

As David Weinberger said recently, the smartest person in the room is now the room.

In 2013, there’s going to be a room born every minute. A very smart room.

Those rooms are going to demand support for their interactions and their creativity, as they change the way they live. That support is going to come from platforms.

Platforms. Open, adaptive, enabling. Allowing ecosystems to be formed and to flourish.

Technology vendors understand platforms. Even incumbent technology vendors understand platforms. But many of them are tied to hardware or processor licensing models, the DRM of the computer industry.

Apple’s climb to the stars has made some of these vendors relive their dreams of yesteryear, allowing them to believe that the money’s in hardware.

The money’s not in hardware.

It’s in ecosystems. (And if the ecosystems support elegant and well-designed hardware, that’s great.)

But it’s the ecosystem that matters, not the hardware. I think it was James Gosling who described OSX as “Linux with QA and Style”. No ecosystem, no hardware sales, no hardware margins.

People forming communities to do magical things together; people building infrastructures that enable this to happen: people creating value individually and collectively across the whole spectrum: in education, health and government; in business and in the arts; in personal lives as well as in community.

All this has been happening for a while, in a William Gibsonish future’s-here-but-unevenly-distributed way.

But a change is gonna come. This whole space is going to get injected with “quantum energy” as the number of empowered people gets to critical mass.

2013. The Year of the Platform.
The Year of the Open Adaptive Platform.

Happy New Year to all of you. Thank you for spending time visiting this blog, reading what I have to say, commenting on it, helping me learn, helping me share.

As usual, comments welcome. But I may not respond straightaway, I’m largely offline for the next week or so.