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Column catchup: Open infrastructure and memetic marketing
While I've been writing about other things, two of my weekly Strategic
Developer columns have spooled up at InfoWorld.com. For those who rely
on this blog for pointers to those columns, here's a rundown.
The rise of open infrastructure
When entrepreneurs pitch their software-as-a-service ideas to me, I
always ask how they plan to compete with what I call the galactic
clusters -- Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These giants have
set a high bar for Internet-scale operations, and they're relentlessly
pushing it higher.
The answer usually comes back: "We're confident we can scale out as
needed." Maybe yes, maybe no. A lot depends on architectural choices
and operational competence. But either way, if you are merely a
planet, you don't want to butt heads with a galaxy.
...
At the moment, it seems very unlikely that a motley crew of volunteers
distributed around the globe will be able to match the economies of
scale and the military discipline that make today's giant clusters the
awesome powers that they are. But shouldn't we have learned, by now,
to expect the unexpected? [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
This column was partly inspired by a
Tim O'Reilly posting. Later, Tim made connections back to my
column (and to a recent blog item on S3) here. The
ensuing discussion drifts over to open source
licensing, but Tim reiterates this key point:
I think that there is an open, cooperative answer to the
infrastructure advantages that accrue to the big web players. It will be interesting to see if it actually develops.
Although P2P technologies point the way forward, they carry way too
much of the wrong kind of baggage. If a there were to emerge a
P2P system dedicated to the robust delivery of services rather
than content, that might help us recalibrate our thinking.
Tech believers, meet evolution
Marketers, when they are lucky, create memes that prosper by viral
replication. But in the Petri dish of popular consciousness, man-made
and organic memes compete on their own terms. They don't actually have
their own agendas but, if we want to understand how they produce
belief systems in us, it may be helpful to pretend that they do. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
My editor, Neil
McAllister, hates it when I use words like meme and
memetic, and I try not to torment him, but once in a while I
indulge myself. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Richard Dawkins'
seminal book The Selfish Gene, as well as the publication of
Daniel Dennett's remarkable Breaking the Spell, I wrote a
little essay exploring how Apple's TV ads can backfire, why we form
religious beliefs about technology, and how modern evolutionary
thinking bears on the memetics (sorry, Neil!) of marketing.
Back in March, by the way, there was an event in London called The
Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On. The speakers were Daniel Dennett, Sir
John Krebs, Matt Ridley, Ian McEwan, and Richard Dawkins. Excellent
stuff -- in particular, I enjoyed Matt Ridley's dissection of the
large fraction of the genome that is literally selfish, replicating
without serving any biological purpose.
You can read their remarks or, as I did, listen
to them.
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