This media analyst on ATG is coming from the wrong direction on topic of Internet. For past 15 years the technical improvements have been with hardware, firstly. Now the PC is relevant, but in 1995 (Windows 95) COM+ groupware OO programming, the hardware limits constrained PCs to same former desktop applications. The programming issue is known as containerization (Don Box's book) see Microsoft technet exerpt. The OO spreadsheet is added to the Word processor article. A similar switchover from data management to DBMS relational systems where data is stored as individual facts, not as information preconceptions. Now data mining and data warehouse stores are more useful.

With these simple advances the PCs became workstations, that could share memory and tasks with mainframes. Applications to weather simulation (global), cargo financial/logistics, and distributed operating systems themselves were slow to come along. The U.S.A. had limited brain power to expend on corporate buy/sell. The implications of telecommunications is after all, the extension of military power. Only with Microsoft Server 2003 was the operating system security becoming strong enough to use the power we had on the shelf since OO systems came to fruitition. And even now the need for systems application developers is off the charts. I use a job search and put in "problem solving". The need for people in IT is all over the country. They call the movement downsizing (to PCs), I recently learned. And I might add that the type of thing that is done with Twitter and Facebook is a first year developer trainee application, and largely irrelevant. The Wall Street Journal or NY Times had recent article about the competition to own patents, and how the companies as those just mentioned are claiming each of them has the original patents for Android and other new OO type systerms. The important ownership would be personnel policy control, because the difference between a system with potential and that without potential is the policy of collaboration. We see applications to school teaching now. The system is nothing without control of personnell and allocations of future development. Systems either grow healthy or they become cancers.

The ATG media analyst, could find a book about the Law of Common Carriers and Innkeepers. I myself am putting issues as these into the community housing network area. There are some books about building networked communities. The book Commonwealth had some appeal. I saw the authors at book fair on cspan television.

The other important part of the collaboration puzzle is the use of "processes" which is a research done by Sybase and SAP and their operating system, now. The Sybase company, like Oracle, pioneered the computer programming field from many directions -code generators, compilers, GUI (mouse and bitmap) programming, and now processes.Their recent publications are by Simha Magal, and Jeffrey Word. Word is supposedly the light shiner for the corporation. Actually those people are with SAP not Sybase but they compete in the work of conduct of business. These processes make it possible to sell one copy of a poem or a schematic engineering diagram. That diagram could contain information about many manufacture processes, and research centers. It could contain knowledge on the scale of world changing information. And the basic data processing, since before OO and distributed data and distributed processing (even parallel constraint programming) invloved years of trials before the DBMS above sould be created. Yet file programming made many advances of research possible, and there is not a patent on some great operating systems. The idea that Google is worthy of patent ownership is a question that sits along side the question of the sale of credit swaps for mortgages on property that was in suburbs where nothing existed but the Internet. Those mortgages are worth what Google is worth, because the processes are bigger than the simple ownership -the basic processes are said to be based upon procurement, fulfillment, production, and integration. However below those processes is the wealth of the known world to be manipulated. Google might just meet the same fate as the Japanese nuclear reactor, hit by a big wave of mud and trash, so what do I care? The analyst did not mention the pioneering corporations or the books written. I would tell him to start over, and a good work requires sufficient research, not marketing. Our computing system interfaces are the key to the ability to have a new human society which is free to choose, or to unchoose from among the alternatives. Systems design is a cautious nterprise, not a first year college class, Berkeley, Palo Alto, New Mexico, Stanford, Bell Labs, Dartmouth, Florida State, Chicago, et al. Merry Xmas
good to hear from sasha on this issue.