In 1969, the Justice Department, ADR, and several others filed antitrust suits
IBM agreed to stop bundling free software
disaggregation is a natural outcome
multiple companies can move faster
Although the metaplatform isn't necessarily elegant
The OS is dissolving into a soup of resources distributed across both the network and the local device, with the application in the middle calling on both
The most effective mobile application are
hybrids of local and network resources
gradual evolution of a super-OS that includes both the network and the device
we don't have a name for this new thing
trouble talking about it
I'm calling it the "metaplatform"
backlog of potential creativity
what it lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in rate of change and versatility
compatibility
what happens if that company goes out of business or just decides to stop maintaining the product?
If you've incorporated external web services into your site, the site will break if any of those services stops working
We don't have any systematic ways to deal with problems like these
a business opportunity for the next crop of software entrepreneurs
What the metaplatform means
Much of the discussion in this post is pretty theoretical
practical implications
iPhone today gives (in my opinion) the best overall mobile browsing and app discovery experience
APIs that will enable other developers to extend
implementation is often off-target
trying to make their APIs into the business equivalent of an operating system
private ecosystem
opening the application outward
mixed and matched with other functionality in the metaplatform
export data isn’t enough... what springs to mind is open source
Lots to think about
Clayton Christensen
technological advances always lead to value chain fragmentation
a framework to predict where most profits will be made