Tim O'Reilly :

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

Update : don't miss this analysis of Google's "less than free" model and mapping data too.

Tim OReilly on Dell's move away from customization and flexible supply-chain.

There are two possibilities: first, that Dell is wrong, and their new supply chain approach will not save them, just make them more like everyone else. It could be that their "live suppy chain" approach just got too crufty, too complex - the article linked above suggests more than 5000 possible configurations. Maybe what they needed to do was to make the system smarter again by streamlining and simplifying.

But it's possible too that the competitive advantage to be wrung from a live enterprise only takes you so far, and that in certain circumstances other advantages are more important. It may well be that the PC market has reduced itself to such commodity status that standardization trumps customization. It may well be that the costs of physical goods mean that the laws of virtual networks are only partly true in that realm.

Worth thinking about, especially as I thought Dell should go in the opposite direction.

Update : Interesting that Dell's suggestion box Ideastorm is full of people demanding better Linux support and pricing. Guess this is a self-selecting audience, of course, but what does Dell do? Create a way of listening to customers and then not follow it for fear of M$, or follow it, and risk the wrath of M$?

PC manufacturers creating sites like this are bad news for M$ either way.

Update 2 : Why are Dell abandoning make-to-order? At one point I wondered if they're actually worrying about long distance just-in-time supply chains as the world energy prices keep going up. But it doesn't look as if that's what's going on. Or is it just a bet on cheap and standard over expensive and flexible (particularly as we go into a recession.)?

Tim O'Reilly gives good advice to Microsoft

It's coming up to Slashdot's 10th anniversary. So here's an interview with Cmdr Taco

He sounds happy enough, but I can't help thinking Slashdot as a brand which was / is really under-exploited. Malder sounds positively over-conservative when he talks about not wanting to change a working formula. I stopped reading Slashdot regularly years ago. Although I still "respect" it, and if it managed to excite me, I'd go back there.

But it just keeps on doing the same thing. Compare /. with, say, O'Reilly . Slashdot had the technical reputation and audience that could have made it a serious competitor to O'Reilly in the whole publishing geek-books, organizing conferences and inventing new memes game. Why didn't it?

(Of course, Tim O'Reilly is very, very clever and uses his publishing company brilliantly. (The only people who seem to have managed to generate any similar excitement in this area are the Rubyistas in Pragmatic Programmers / 37 Signals.) )

And it's strangely defensive to say that Slashdot isn't trying to be Digg or Reddit etc. The point is, these guys used to be innovators (Everything 2?) why aren't they playing with new ideas? Why no Slashdot social network, or publishing company, or cool use of social software on Sourceforge? (They're buying their wiki from someone else.) Why no code-search like Koders? Why does ThinkGeek seem to be selling a lot of tat novelties when it could have been experimenting with user-contributed T-shirts like Threadless or promoting serious hobbyist electronics the way O'Reilly does with Make?

Someone with some attitude could still do something dramatic and exciting with Slashdot / Sourceforge. I'd like to see it.