I’ve just returned from the ETCON held in Santa Clara over the past 4 days (and still going on today, too). There’s an enormous amount of exciting activity going on at the conference, almost all devoted to innovating by testing ideas in code.
I’ll start by laying out a few of the observations I’ve made so far:
- There is tremendous value in the “bottoms-up” approach of hacking. I think this view gets underappreciated many times in the tops-down view of finding a market, defining its size, then defining the market approach into that space. Granted that this is a valuable and critical exercise, but it needs the experimentation effect of looking for those nascent needs that creating apps provides. Whether or not the final form it takes will be the same as how a hacker (or app developer envisions it) is a different matter, but all of the activities around blogs, 802.11, GNU software radio, hardware hacking, RSS newsreaders, and Google’s talks reinforced to me that building is a method of discovering the demand in the first place.
- Open Source software is rapidly maturing in its model, and is receiving strong validation from major players like Apple (Mac OS X) and Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation. Open Source advocates and participants would tell you this stuff has been real for quite a while (and they’d be right), but backing by industry leaders such as these wil help bring the open source model into the mainstream. Mitch Kapor talked about his vision of creating a platform not only for open software but for an ecology of mixed free and commercial licensing. We may well find that one of the biggest benefits of OSAF is that it facilitates the creation of new business models around open source.
A constant theme of the conference has been innovation, and how open systems allow for bottoms-up discovery of new applications, new products, new things that ultimately create value in some way. Google’s Craig Silverstein talks about how Google encourages innovation, 802.11 allows for grassroots building of wireless networks, GNU radio allows for software-defined use of RF spectrum. The common theme is opening the floodgates for innovation.