[LINK] Business fetishism (was Re: LINK] Four Corners NBN)

[Greg Taylor]

On 2011/04/13 9:42 AM, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
>
> Finally, regarding apps of the future. E-learning and tele-health are
> already passe in terms of the NBN debate. We focus on them because
> they're things we're already familiar with - we can visualise what they
> do. But nearly all of the "great killer Internet applications" are not
> top-down, but bottom-up. Here's a short list of applications I nominate
> as "user led" that changed the world and the network:
>
> SMTP
> VoIP (invented by John Walker because he wanted on-network calls from
> Europe to the US)
> HTML (Tim Berners-Lee)
> Skype
> Google
> BitTorrent
>
> I realise that I'm ignoring counter-examples, but I would expect that
> any competent study would find successful, pervasive user-led
> innovations outnumber business-led innovations on the Internet.
>

Totally agree. I would add to your list open source and 
community-developed software, e.g.
Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Gimp, Drupal, Wordpress, Firefox etc. etc.

Many of these products have been eagerly adopted by business and 
government because of their obvious advantages compared with proprietary 
software (and not just on price). The Internet would not have developed 
so rapidly without them.

Cheers,

Greg