[Embedlets-dev] Re:[Marketing] Embedlets and the Innovator's Dilemma....

[Ted K. <tk...@ya...>]

Andrzej,

Very interesting article!



> Again, it's very possible (if embedlets become a "disruptive technology" in
> the embedded 
> space), that the initial adopters of this technology are not even known to us
> right now.

This brings to mind an article by Clay Shirky about some of the fundamental
reasons that the Web built out so quickly:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/view_source.html

I especially like his philosophy of focusing on what a technology can 'do', not
what it is 'for':

----

"#3. Good tools tell you what they do, not what they're for.

Good, general-purpose tools specify a series of causes and effects,
nothing more. This is another part of what allowed the Web to grow so
quickly. When a piece of software specifies a series of causes and
effects without specifying semantic values (gravity makes things fall
to the ground, but gravity is not for keeping apples stuck to
the earth's surface, or for anything else for that matter), it
maximises the pace of innovation, because it minimizes the degree to
which an effect has to be planned in advance for it to be useful.

The best example of this was the introduction of tables, first
supported in Netscape 1.1. Tables were originally imagined to be just
that - a tool for presenting tabular data. Their subsequent adoption
by the user community as the basic method for page layout did not have
to be explicit in the design of either HTML or the browser, because
once its use was discovered and embraced, it no longer mattered what
tables were originally for, since they specified causes and effects

that made them perfectly suitable in their new surroundings" [snip]


Ted


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