2004-12-16

Paradigms lost

Mennyire igaza van britton.manasco-nak
Well, the week may have started with the announcement that Oracle would acquire PeopleSoft. However, Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly & Associates, has provocatively stated that "eBay will someday buy Oracle." O'Reilly's facetious point is that the interconnected, global Web is enabling a new power shift that tends to commoditize software much as software arose amid the commoditization of hardware a generation before. "[C]ompanies like eBay and Amazon that are not really now thought of as computer companies or players in the computer industry may one day be seen in that way," he says in an interview with David Kaye at IT Conversations. Just as IBM underestimated Microsoft, so too, might the power of today's digital savvy "end user" companies ...
[Via ZDNet Blogs]