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The way I would put it is: most of the things we call "wisdom" are more like "fashion." It's fashionable to be "in the cloud." It's fashionable to "fail fast." And so on. These are cyclical attributes; one can always find, at the least, an anecdotal situation which demonstrates or disproves their worth. And over a period of time - one year, five years, 30 years - the fashion runs its course, gets replaced by something else, and then gets revived again. And - the other part of this is - tech businesses, and consequently tech employees, are entirely reliant on staying within the fashion to make their money. Any single product you push out today has a good chance of devaluing within a few years, if the industry as a whole moves on. And so, over and over, part of the fashion cycle is the monopoly play - every company races to monopolize and lock in its users so that it can break through the fashion cycle, sit on the product with old tech, and maximize extraction. But then, some time later, it gets disrupted by a startup, which then proceeds to lock in its users... Triple-O strategies (open standard, open source, open development) seem to break the fashion cycle in software over the very long-term and force business to move to new categories(a good thing for the global economy, especially with software demand being ever-increasing). This is especially true when an open solution can break out of the "back office" and improve its UX. But one of the big, largely unanswered questions is whether businesses can be given economic incentives to remain open, and whether this phenomenon can escape software and move into hardware. |