I listened to the IT Conversations interview with Tim O'Reilly on the way in this morning. Very interesting interview. I love the vision that Tim has for his company - it's more about capturing knowledge (whatever that means) rather than growing their market. It's kind of cool to see how taking the right attitude can actually lead to a strong position in the market (how many people buy O'Reilly books vs. the others? I'd bet a LOT).
The big paradigm shift is also pretty cool... PCs and their OS become less important, as applications really do move into a more decentralized space (he uses Google as an example of a pervasive network app). What he didn't mention is that the decreased focus on the PC and its OS means that people will become more able to select their tools based on need, and not by some 95% market share domination by a single OS vendor...
It also struck me that the simple fact of my listening to a freely distributed interview, published to the web as an .mp3 file, played by my iPod while taking the bus into work might be a bit of a paradigm shift as well. On-demand content, MeTV, that kind of thing...
Why would I post about this? It was triggered by the fact that I saved the GMail Invitation entry into software/google/gmail...