I started a page with my political views. As they change, if I stick to it, the page will change as well. Note when I edit the changes automatically post. Reload the page to be sure you're looking at the latest. #
- Note: This was a Twitter thread, turned into a blog post. #
- The press sees only one thing when they look at tech -- companies. The biggest ones. They are not the exclusive driving force of technology. Open systems, that they always oppose, keep undermining them. You're not even getting 1/2 the story.#
- It's important because there's a lot of political movement when tech's grip on tech is gone, when there's a generational shift in platforms. I've seen at least four of these in my life: Unix, PCs, GUI (Mac/Windows), Web. The powerful companies were always caught flat-footed.#
- The blindness of the press re tech evolution always amazes me. At first I thought they all must see it. A few did, in the early days, but now -- that knowledge appears lost.#
- It's important that they see it because the press has been an important part of the transition at least in the turn to GUIs and the web. I have a feeling the next platform will rise out of journalism getting tired of waiting for tech, believe it or not.#
- Also when the press looks for transformational change, they tend to see ones that require massive capital investment, and miss the ones that break the rules of the incumbent platform. The PC let people have their own computer without interference from corporate managers.#
- The Mac let people publish their own documents, newsletters, and evolved into a platform that could publish newspapers and magazines, far less expensively and much more easily that typographic systems they replaced.#
- And the web upended the GUI's dominance, by making networking so simple anyone could do it. And making the niceties of print unnecessary. It was really something watching the WYSIWYG crowd (of which I was one) struggle with the inability of the web to be wizzy.#
- Yet the web rose to dominance because the power of networking (Amazon, FB, Twitter, email, banking, Yelp, Craigslist, podcasting, etc etc) was so huge. Okay it didn't look as pretty but look at what it DOES.#
