Life on the Street

The Internet is hardly the only important figure in the information sector, but it was the most blessed. Unlike the Internet’s coddled youth as a play­thing for the funded and sagacious, the software industry endured a rough and tumble childhood on the mean streets of competitive com­merce.

One software company in particular emerged as the kingpin, domi­nating first operating systems—those critical programs that defined the translation frontier—then the graphical interfaces to those operating systems. From that position of strength, it expanded to take over a broad swath of the applications terrain. Its operating system evolved upward, as its graphical interfaces finally stabilized to allow safe integration into the underlying operating system. This evolved product at the translation frontier took the name “platform.”

At just about the time that the evolved platform first appeared, the kingpin of software, toughened, scarred, and cocky, first encountered the Internet nai'f wandering gingerly into the world of commerce. The kingpin was perplexed; never had he encountered such crude gullibility. It seemed that the Internet had come to town intending to wade in the dirty waters of commerce without getting soiled. She had arrived with an ethic of openness and sharing, and asked for little beyond Mountain Dew and a foosball table. The kingpin ignored her; life in the city would teach the Internet a lesson.

But the kingpin’s savvy scouts noticed that this bumpkin of an Inter­net, despite her obvious naivety, was not without a certain charm—or a certain potential.

And so the kingpin set out to remake the Internet in his own image. He employed the very same methods that had served him so well on his way to the top. And once again, he littered the streets with the bodies that he left behind. Almost without our noticing it, the Internet began to appear dressed in the kingpin’s clothes. We almost lost sight of her, as she moved behind the kingpin’s gates to be glimpsed only through his windows. No longer did the Internet romp through the mosaic of soft­ware styles that she had enjoyed in her carefree youth. And though the selfsame government that had given the Internet life and trusted her to find fame and fortune in the city of commerce moved to challenge the kingpin of software, its efforts may have been too little and too late. For more and more, the Internet came to resemble the kingpin, until one day we found ourselves looking from kingpin to Internet, and from Internet to kingpin, and from kingpin to Internet again; but already it was impos­sible to say which was which.