Don't open the box and break the "warranty seal". It keeps the magic in. But the hacker imperative is that when you open the box, that's when the magic starts.

Mass Amateurization. It's not just the geeks any more taking things apart and recombining them. Really powerful things happen when the amateurs open the box.

Alpha Geeks are consumer 0. Now consumer one are doing things like swapping the hard drive on their cameras.

Why now.
- 20 years into the PC era.
- Given enough eyeballs, all features are obvious
- Advent of the lazyweb. Somebody, somwhere knows how to do it
- Gospel of openness is spreading.

So why Remix rather than hack?
- Remixing is inherently more conversational than hacking.

Examples
- Remix the web. View source.
- Firefox and Thunderbird
- Javascript. Google Suggest.
- Desktop integration. Google, MSN, Yahoo desktop search with browser as the interface
- Music Mashups and MP3 sample sharing. Customers and Biz weren't listening. But Apple was.
- Remix your TV. Tivo. leaves things open enough to do 30 sec skip through adverts.
- Remix your network. Wifi, Hotspots. Intel Brands Wifi. Apple do Airport express.
- Remix movies. BitTorrent. Video on demand. Netflix. Everyone teams with everyone else. Swarmcasting.
- Remix your data. Open APIs from Amazon. Small pieces lossely joined.
- Remix your text. I'm blogging this. Mass amateurism
- Remix syndication. RSS to desktop aggregators, to shared, to MyYahoo.
- Remix your bookshelf. Convert all text ever to digital. Project Gutenberg, Amazon search inside the book.
- Remix IT. Slew of specialists. Be liberal in what you accept, rigorous in what you put out. Hacks become frameworks. Raw material (opens ource code snippets), Nothing ever lost.
- Remix the browser. Firefox is an application environment.
- Remix Bricks and mortar. Anyone without an online presence will fade into the background.
- Remix Space Burt Rutan and Spaceship One.

Be unreasonable. And dis-satisfied. And fix it.


[ << Etcon ] [ Tim O'Reilly >> ]
[ 15-Mar-05 6:44pm ] [ ]