"Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university."
Tech Crunch interviews Marc Andreessen, who more or less brought the web to the masses when he started Netscape, the first serious web browser (more recently he’s been some of the money and brains behind Ning):
[Andreesen] believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.
A sixteen-year-old perspective on Techcrunch:
If you look at technologies trending with teens right now, it’s Apple devices (iPhone, iPod), smart phones (Blackberry, Palm), and then social networks (Facebook and MySpace). At least that’s what I see from hanging out with 1,500 other teenagers in high school every day (I am 16 years old). But why not Twitter? Well, because Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other. The way my friends and I see it, Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network.
Martin’s comment: From my observation, this seems to be true with blogs too and for a lot of folks in their early 20s.
From the article, Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome:
In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. “It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,” Google writes tonight on its blog.
The NYTimes also runs an article, Google Plans a PC Operating System.
Martin’s commentary: Google releases its share of junk that it never really supports (Froogle, Google Notebook) and it buys companies that it lets whither away Yahoo-style (Feedburner), but when there’s something they want to go after they’re completely serious.
A Chrome OS makes a lot of sense and explains why they went to so much trouble to make a Google branded browser even though they already pretty much had one (Firefox development is more or less paid for by Google). It’s often been reported that Google employees have their own Linux-based operating system and now they’ll clean it up and release it widely.
Smart move, though I wonder why they didn’t go the Mozilla route: fund a third party to do the development work as an open source project and keep it officially at arm’s length. Kind of hard not seeing the anti-trust government units not getting nervous when the operating system, browser and user data all has “GOOGLE” stamped on it.
