A Wizard Tells It Straight: The Web Is Not an Operating System
June 4, 2008
Straight up Tim Bray’s post here is one of the best things I have read today, maybe in the last few months. Dr. Bay may not be as well known at Paris Hilton, but he’s been a contributor and innovator for many years. One example: He teamed with Dr. Ramanathan Guha to whack out the document that defined some of the semantic Web’s more interesting bits.
The most important point for me in his excellent essay was:
Lots of modern business is all about pumping information. The classic example would be finance; banks are giant information pumps with cash machines at the edges. Organizations (business, governments, clubs, political parties, religions) who figure out how to surf the new information flow will succeed and prosper; those who push back will be swept away. And it won’t have anything to do with whether anything’s like an OS or not.
Highly recommended, and he hits the theme “the Internet is about people” dead on as well. If you don’t recall any other innovations from Dr. Bray, think SGML. He contributed to that as well. For a fuller bio, click here.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
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