Marc Andresen was the first key note speaker and I was sort of looking forward to ‘seeing’ Marc again. I worked at Netscape a long, long time ago. He didn’t look good. His shaved head makes him look rather pallid. It was an interview session and Marc didn’t bite at any of the bait the interviewer left out for him. So no interesting tidbits about Microsoft, Netscape, AOL or anything else.
In fact I was rather bored as it was the same old blather that has become routine in the tech industry. Tech is great, tech will save your mortal soul, pray to the tech gods that tech will save your village from the barbarians. Repent of your non-tech ways lest the wrath of the tech-god turn his shining tech light away from you and leave you in the abject non-tech squalor… blah blah blah.
However the next person to ‘speak’ via a video and chat was Jonathan Zittrain professor who has written a book entitled, The future of the internet and how to stop it. He focused on the legal aspects of technolgoy creation and innvoation and that he sees a strangalation of innovation and miseredly control of tech by the mega-platform vendors that will eventually lead us to a highly controlled and monotized web where innovation, disent and collaboration will die.
Marc is a customer and is kind of a pain in the you-know-what…