Doc Searls: Where they need something in the infrastructure space, they'll roll their own if they have to, as they did with FireWire. But in other cases, like with BSD and with USB and Apache, they'll cherry-pick what they need. So it's a matter of carefully adopting and driving ubiquitous standards.
It's also finally happening with Web services. Craig says they are finally starting to emerge now as a result of infrastructure anarchy. And what's smart is when companies cause anarchy in a market, like you're doing right now. I was sitting there in the audience at lunch thinking I was looking at what we used to call a corporate sex change. It's huge. It's total. You're saying some of the same things I was hearing from (from Linux vendors) several years ago, but from a much different perspective, because you have commercial success that most other companies have never enjoyed. And you're involved with this community internally. I know this from the emails I get from people involved in your company saying they're doing really cool stuff.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
Doc Searls: You haven't been able to talk about this stuff for a long time, but now you've created a structure where you can.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
... Doc Searls: ... And this is how these two conceptual frameworks fit together here. This is where it's really critical. You have commercial where it's proprietary and closed, and you have infrastructure where it's open and public domain. And the smart companies know how to work both sides of this. In your case there's been this tectonic shift, and bang: this (the company's infrastructural stuff) is all exposed.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
Doc Searls: We can understand: "Oh: you're selling this (commercial stuff) and you're working with everybody else on either giving this (infrastructure stuff) away or co-developing it. And suddenly it all starts to make sense.
Rob Glaser: Yup.
Mon Aug 12 2002 12:31:
A one-sided market:
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