Internet Is the Platform, Web 2.0 Founder Says

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2286997,00.asp

Internet Is the Platform, Web 2.0 Founder Says
04.24.08
by Dave Mathews

SAN FRANCISCO—Tim O'Reilly, organizer and founder of the Web 2.0 event here, spoke Wednesday about the element of change in the technology sector: whether the headlines are really driving trends, or if innovation continues on despite what analysts are saying about the industry.
The trends
The Internet is the platform – a tool for harnessing collective intelligence, O'Reilly said. Data has become the "Intel Inside" and software is above being written for just a single device, meaning desktops, laptops and mobile devices. The proof? Facebook and Google hosted applications and email. Gone are the days that he needed to load a client that needs to be synced on my different devices, O'Reilly said. Finally software is a service thanks to great connectivity; and it is only getting better with WiMax and 700MHz LTE - the next generation of municipal broadband, and one that will actually get deployed.
Cloud computing as a platform is driving this software as a service model. If one cannot connect to communications, the value of your PC is diminished, O'Reilly added. This means that the computer, mobile phone and also future platforms like television with two-way data feeds are becoming display devices for getting data into and out of the cloud. The Internet becomes the operating system.
The heart of Web2.0 is the community – building collective intelligence from the mass of people that you can reach and interact and hear from – like customers which make this community, O'Reilly added.
Google page rank was the beginning of the Web 2.0 era and a breakthrough in search. When a page had many links to it, then it had value. This was the beginning of opening up data and "liberating it" and their traffic and resulting stock price has shown that this was an extremely successful idea.
The best 2.0 start-ups will help other businesses collect data and build databases whose value grows based upon the number of participants. It's a race to accumulate as much as possible to provide intelligence, which results in power to the consumer, service or business.
Software above the level of a single device: Software in the cloud is more useful and powerful than a computer that has no access, O'Reilly added. Computer input devices are the limiting factor now. That will change as new input mechanisms like voice and image capturing will take over the keyboard – purposely designed hundreds of years ago to slow down our input on ancient typewriters.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2286997,00.asp