Community vs. Platform
Zawodny of Yahoo quotes Bosworth:
Bosworth: ?The real value in my opinion has moved from the software to the information and the community.?
Zawodny: ?Now does his move to Google make more sense??
First, I don’t think there ever was a ?phase? where the perceived value was in the ?software? as opposed to the information and the community. Software has always been about information; we’ve used the term ?information technology? since before I was born. And technology has been about community since the printing press was born. Saying that some in the industry could have lived through the rise of the WWW over the last decade and still not ?get? the value of community is just not credible.
Zawodny must have forgotten that Bosworth ran the web browser team at Microsoft, and then the XML team (named ?WebData?, which should imply something about the value proposition). It’s true that people sometimes go overboard about software ?platforms? (and especially at app server vendors like BEA where Bosworth recently worked). But it’s just a bit contrived to talk about ?information and community? as if it’s something special and new that only the search engine vendors get.