At dinner last night I gave my usual schpiel about how DaveNet started, and since I was dining with Microsoft people I emphasized the early piece I wrote about Bill Gates, and his response. I quoted Bill saying that the Internet wouldn't mean less sales for Flight Simulator or Encarta, and I said he was right but that wasn't the point. One of my companions stopped me there and said wait a minute, the Internet did mean less sales for Encarta. I was shocked. That's correct, and Gates got it wrong, and I wasn't enough of a visionary to see it. I got it wrong too. Who needs an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM when you have the Web at your fingertips? Someday some kid is going to ask you What is Encarta? That might be where you end up going today. [Dave Winer]This makes me think particularly of Wikipedia. Dave's right. But way back then, it was hard for even the brightest and best-informed to see.
The power of people to band together on the Internet to create free (as in both beer and speech) projects such as Wikipedia or Linux is an incredible and unforeseeable development in the world. It's truly an emergent phenomenon -- it couldn't be predicted until the substrate and numbers of agents were actually in place to make it happen.
OK, maybe there were some who did predict it. You can always find somebody who "predicted" almost anything by random chance alone. But the fact is, in those early days, not even Linus Torvalds predicted what would happen.
Comments