Friday, April 26, 2002

ZDNet: Tech Update: Enterprise Applications / West Wing meets Web services
IBM and Microsoft are doing what comes naturally--angling to establish intellectual property rights and patents that would give them an advantage over competitors. They have the legal and engineering resources, as well as the economic incentive, to shift the balance of power. After all, the giant companies become giants by developing proprietary solutions that often include barriers to entry. Altruism is not a quality that would describe the builders of commercial or digital solutions in any market sector.

Yet, the evolution of the Internet at its core levels requires a kind of altruism and cooperation to ensure continued innovation that favors the whole and not the few. Like the telephone or airline systems, there are many points along which value for services can be extracted to benefit the supplier and the customer. The question is at what point in a stack of protocols and standards does value extraction conflict with creating viable options for customers and impede innovation?
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2862036,00.html

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