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conflux

Wired Magazine Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance
"I suppose - but the boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. You know, when the information highway was the craze, the question I would ask [then-Bell Atlantic CEO] Ray Smith and [then-TCI chair] John Malone was, Who the hell is going to spend the billions of dollars it will take to build this thing out? You guys? The federal government? It's not going to happen. And no one could give me an answer as to who was going to pay. Well, it turns out that the answer was the investing public, who rabidly ran and shoved the money into the hands of the infrastructure builders. It is probably true that the infrastructure would have gotten built anyway. But instead of it happening over 15 years, it happened over 5, because of the gold rush mentality and all these investors trying to get in on it. So the boom accelerated the deployment of the infrastructure, and I'm talking about the Amazons of the world as much as the JDS Uniphases. Amazon's database is a kind of infrastructure - commerce-related infrastructure. When [Merrill Lynch analyst] Henry Blodget projected Amazon would go to $400 and the investing public rushed in, they were funding the deployment of Amazon's infrastructure, which is part of the totality of the Internet infrastructure. And all I can think is, How would this all have happened any other way?"

Doc Searls Bet on nature
"Infrastructure has three fundamental characteristics:
Nobody owns it
Everybody can use it
Anybody can improve it
We need free & open source geeks to generate more infrastructure. We also need commercial and closed source geeks to do the same, contributing as much as they can, to the ubiquitous infrastructure that makes our new world."

"The free software and open source movements, for example, love to talk about licensing, which is really a set of social contracts that attempt to reconcile ideas about the nature of software with ideas about the nature of business."

News.Com Singing hosannas for Linux
"Open source is good for business. Now I should add that open source is not for everything in software. We have a very large and successful software business, and we're going to retain that. But open source is great for infrastructure code. The reason is that to make open source work, there has to be an overlap between the people who care about the software and the people who make the software better."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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