Internet is like a gas...

Hi...

I was recently at a discussion about - you guessed - web 3.0 ;-)

Just before that I had the chance to see Dirk Primbs with his keynote at the BASTA! conference near Frankfurt/Main.

Dirk quoted a somehow strange guy (the guy used to be a Microsoftie, is a well known cook for french cuisine, studied nearly everything and much more..but I forgot his name ;-) Live Search revealed "Nathan Myhrvold"): Software is a gas...

For me as a Physicist (ok, I did that years in the past and it seems like a whole lifetime away..now) it was obvious (at least that much I still know ;-) what he meant.

Gas is an aggregation state in which substances "life" the nature horror-vacui (and to be honest my Latin is even worse than my French). Whenever there is a compartment or container to be filled a gas will so more or less quickly. Even better: Gases mix. If you open a valve between two compartments with different gases in them the Brownian motion of the particles will lead to a situation where the two gases are mixed. The hotter (aka the heavier the Brownian motion is) the faster it works.

I found this a very interesting model. And it also stays for the Internet. Whenever the Internet has the chance to enter a certain space it will. Sometimes it will take longer e.G. when an already accepted and installed technology is in place. A good example is television where there are huge installments already made but we are all quite sure about the future of distribution. The weaker the current solutions is or the less distributed the faster it can go. The more expensive broadband is or the lower the bandwidth or connection quality is the longer it will take (just as temperature does). For me "felt security" is also an important driver: If the service does not "feel" secure it will have a hard time to step up from its infancy. 

If somebody develops a really new idea there is a new container in vacuum which is filled in nearly no time. The idea of worldspanning communities is such.

So one can extract a go-to-action command for our industry: Connect things to the Internet it will take care of the rest ;-)

This is the really power behind it...hmm.

Greetings from Redmond...

CU

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