JC Herz (Joystick Nation), Joi Ito (Neoteny), Maria Martinez (MSFT), Ross Mayfield (SocialText) "Making Business Sense of Networks" Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com July 8, 2003 Supernova Conference Washington DC -- Joi Ito: From mainframes to minis to PCs to phones: an order of mangitude of increase in devices at each step. I don't care if MSFT takes over the desktop, because it will dwindle to the importantce of mainframes today. How can CE devices eclipse PCs and communcations tools? Some layers of your business make money, some don't. They flipflop. NTT DoCoMo loses moeny on its devices and makes $8BB on network services. Soon it will go away due to end-to-end and new biz will come up. -- JC Herz: The medium is collective behaviour: not pixels. You ride atop human nature. Games are popular/profitable because they push our buttons particularily if we're boys between 19-24. We can change hardware, software but I'm bothered by the short shrift human nature gets. SixDegrees, etc, are good ideas that don't scale (like Communism). Putting all your address books online and sharing them with strangers sounds like a good idea. Sure we could eliminate phone numbers in favor of buddy-lists, but then you'd remove the social value of being an introducer. -- Ross Mayfield: What's great about our structure is that we're not setting up barriers to using different communications patterns. We allow social conventions to emerge. Our new tools can mine everything: email logs, blogs, etc, and we cna produce these master maps of who's tied to whom and arm sales orgs, etc. But what does it get us? Strong ties are not weak ties. Not all links are the same. We can foster strong ties, and we don't get power-law distributions. We get random ones, even links per node. -- Maria Martinez: The network of the future is the network of things, not people. This isn't your refrigerator on the Internet. This is: * Supply chain applications: replacing barcodes with RFIDs * Security and access-control: all security devices will be network-connected, with access-control databases updated in realtime (border controls via homeland security) * Medical: Blood analyzers, IV pumps, etc all on the network * Energy: Optimized water-control systems Lots of security and privacy issues. -- Joi: Everything should be separable and built on open standards. Identity can come from one place, other pieces can come from others. This is like the emergence of IETF in the wake of X25 and the rise today of Echo. We need some organization, but not too much organization. We don't want XML consortia with big companies forcing standards on tool-makers. -- JC: Consoles are $200 PCs, equivalent to supercomputers a few years ago. Tens of millions of them. -- Ross: We need either a shared resource (open spectrum) or a good regulatory framework (a strong FTC) or open standards (IETF). This gets us "economies of span." -- Joi: Historically, it's whoever gets users. HTML got users and couldn't get ignored. Hackers write good shit, get customers and then the regulators and the telcos and the standards bodies follow. Industry leadership is irrelevant. Unemployed smart hackers will lead the way. -- JC: The sign of a healthy ecology is not just that new things can come along but that old things can die. Today, things that don't work well aren't allowed to die. -- Ross: We get new tools when users in companies bring them in under the radar, bottom up. Blogs and wikis and etc are the PCs and LANs of todays, snuck in despite the IT. -- JC: Software companies have bought into the myth that you ship an expensive "enterprise" edition, you spend a fortune on sales before you see a dollar. But if people sneak personal software into the enterprise, the myth fails. -- Ross: The bust taught us to be leery of big purchases. The bust gave us a bunch of hot infrastructure that's now going cheap: lots of people are online for the first time in a long time and engaging socially. And all the users are developers -- cool crap is getting built as a consequence. Word of mouth will be the most important piece of adoption. -- Joi: Anil Dash sez, during the dotboom, it was all about enterprise MIS plans, in spite of how users worked. Now it's bottom up. Consumer adoption drives enterprise tech decisions. -- JC: The wrong lesson of the dotbomb is "consumers won't pay for things." It's a face-saving enterprise aimed at eliding the fact that "our ideas were stupid." This has created a prejudice against selling consumers that's more face-saving than wisdom. -- Maria: There's a difference between consumers and enterprises. Connecitivy is a given in enterprises. [ED: In an enterprise, firewalls and filters are a given! Not so in home networks!] --