Marc Canter's talk

Reboot 2003, Copenhagen, Denmark

20JUN03

Impressionistic notes by Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

--

Things need to be small and modular: programmers working nights,
little companies. The VCs pushed us to head for IPO, so entire
companies were based on one feature. In my world, companies have
multiple products.

I'm going to talk about Longhorn and how we can compete with
MSFT.

Open source: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. With the right standards,
we can equal Longhorn by building a people's mesh.

I used to hack video-game melodies in Assembler, but no musician
composes in Assembler. My generation was the "productivity" app
generation (Lotus, Word, etc) -- we need another jump, as great
as the jump from Assembler to Productivity apps, to allow normal
people to express themselves.

We need a new paradigm for tools. A year ago this month, I
presented an outline to Tim O'Reilly a proposal for a book called
"A New Paradigm for Tools." I'm always 10 years ahead. Tim said,
Huh?

Today, tools come build into the browser. I have an OSS tool that
anyone can use, provided they give credit.

Online communities:

* Your first responsibility is to your family.

* Your next level is eGroups, mailing lists, etc

* The next level is the web

We want to give you a tool that works with all three levels.

With Macromind, we created a lock-in strategy. I apologize
[applause].