Tracking the InevitableSep15

Brooks Jordan 0 comments

This week, the book I can't put down, published in 2001, is "Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft." It's such an insightful romp through the super-heated PC and Internet days of the nineties. Microsoft, as the perfect company of that era, serves as the perfect lens through which to view it.

I don't know how, or if, Gates fumbled the future of Microsoft, but one thing he was absolutely right about was the separation of software from hardware as PCs became small and cheap enough for everyone. Gates saw that software was going to commoditize hardware, be the center of value and innovation, and that because it could span all hardware systems, one company could create and own at least the first layer. As it turns out, Microsoft ended up owning one and two: Windows and Office.

Seeing so clearly the role software would play atop hardware, Gates famously said: "Sometimes people are just incapable of tracking the inevitable."

Although RSS itself doesn't represent the sea change in information use that software did when Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, it is a perfect example of the sea change brought about by the Internet as a whole.

What's unique - and powerful - about the Internet is that because it's inherently open, and no one owns the base platform, the deck is always stacked in favor of matching the right piece of information with the right person in the right place or interface. Said another way, if data has no true boundaries and interfaces are flexible and malleable, then why would we not ask for our chunks and crumbs of information, or threads and streams, when and how we want it?

"We are headed into a world of atomic content [and] data objects that are free, open, mixable, mashable, 'two-way' and 'always on,'" writes Fred Wilson, a successful Internet venture capitalist and passionate blogger.

Adam Bosworth, now at Google, but once a major engineer and player at Microsoft, says in "Breaking Windows" that one of the universals about the Internet if you're going to go with it instead of against it is that all of the platforms, systems, and applications must be "loosely coupled" in a way that allows networks, whether they are markets or communities, to flourish.

The point is that RSS is the quintessential technology for moving data between these loosely-coupled points. It carries the "free, open, mixable, mashable" data that we want to places that we want to be: our desktop, our blog widget, our twiki, our Treo, and so on. RSS is pure Web. By "syndicating" some piece of data as the user - box scores, political alerts, movies, iCal events, new invoices, inventory changes, revenue forecasts (it could be anything!) - you're choosing it based on relevance, for if it's not something else is always eager to replace it.

RSS, we believe, is inevitable. Attensa Connect is a way for us to track it with all of you. We'd like to do that through this blog, through the example projects you see in the sidebar, by giving you our source code, and by fiddling, philosophizing, testing, and breaking as many rules we can to understand the open Web and the role of RSS in it.