Re:WebAssembly: Mozilla Won
by wpietri on Thursday June 01, 2017 @10:43AM
(#14460653)
> MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again.
The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.
We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.
Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.
The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.
We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.
Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.