A couple of greate rants by Anil Dash:
Some Excerpts:
In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone the service, you'd be described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act.
Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren't subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.
And from the second link, strategies in general:
- Take responsibility and accept blame.
- Don't just meet the UX standards, raise the bar.
- Rethink funding fundamentals.
- Explore architectural changes.
- Outflank by pursuing talent outside the obvious.
- Exploit their weakness: Insularity.
- Dont' trust the trade press.
- Create public spaces.
This rant by James Somers ties in tangentially, I think.
My friends and I who are building websites -- we're kids! We're kids playing around with tools given to us by adults. In decreasing order of adultness, and leaving out an awful lot, I'm talking about things such as: the Von Neumann stored program computing architecture; the transistor; high-throughput fibre-optic cables; the Unix operating system; the sci-fi-ish cloud computing platform; the web browser; the iPhone; the open source movement; Ruby on Rails; the Stack Overflow Q&A site for programmers; on and on, all the way down to the code that my slightly-more-adult co-workers write for my benefit.
He posits that web companies don't really contribute to technology any more. They take public code and technologies, and build monetizable walled gardens.