link

There are some great observations in this overly long essay.

One interesting trend is the shift of value away from software and toward the network effects surrounding software-based services. What this means is that while the software of ebay or amazon or orkut is fairly easy to clone, each of these businesses has its competitive advantage in the scale and involvement of its user base. The advantage is not in writing software, but in developing self-sustaining communities that invite and reward effective participation. This is dependent on software in roughly the same way that good cities are dependent on the layout of public spaces, roads, parks, transit networks, and buildings. Given enough money, you could clone all of these aspects of a city, but your clone wouldn't have any life until it was full of people constantly occupying the physical space and gradually reshaping it to fit their own lives.

In other words, skills now crucial in making software aren't taught in The Art of Computer Programming. If you want to make software, read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, or better yet, A Pattern Language.

There is also some grist for the prediction mill in this essay. Here are mine:

• Microsoft will ship open-source software within 10 years. Leading up to this point, they will transition to a business focused primarily on helping people find and use content (including software) created by third parties. Their software margins will crumble during this time period, but they may be able to sustain a profitable software business by driving quality up and cost down due to explosive growth in the number of devices that use software.
• Some interesting stuff is going to happen when people start figuring out how to commoditize network effects. This problem will require figuring out how to make software more responsive to user intentions, and less brittle at the mercy of incompatible formal interfaces. The driving forces in the next generation of programming systems will be social, not technical.