Web Services / Cloud Computing

A few days ago we remarked on the inevitability of Twitter looking at the best 3rd party Apps areas and grabbing them for itself. News comes today of Facebook throttling developers ability to virally market (aka spam) their apps - All Facebook:

Just over 24 hours after Facebook turned off application notifications, developers are reporting a dramatic decrease in traffic. Speaking to a number of developers, we’ve heard traffic has decreased in the range of 10 to 50 percent, depending on the application, most hovering between an 18 to 27 percent decrease. While our poll sample was small, Facebook developers are now entering the “post-notifications era”.

And why do this? To regain control of their own distribution channels and put their own castles on them of course:

With an estimated $350 million in revenue last year from performance advertising, Facebook is heavily focused on this space. However, virtual goods are also an area which Facebook is hoping to experience a large amount of growth.

While it’s not known whether or not Facebook will force developers to use their Credits platform, there’s a very good chance Facebook will become the primary payment provider of all virtual goods on their site. This means Credits could very well become a business worth over $300 million a year if the platform is expected to generate over $1 billion in revenue each year.

..............

There are two parties now who are “paying to play”: developers, who will now purchase more ads to drive traffic to their applications, and users, who will increasingly pay for virtual goods in games. While it appears that application requests and other channels still drive traffic, developers have become one of the largest buyers of Facebook ads.

Do developers have other options? In theory they can decamp to other platforms but of course those have their own dominant ecosystems so new entrants have to spend even more resources to clamber up the greasy pole, and it is probably inevitable that all ecosystem holders will increase rents over time. But in the sort term....

...developers will have to deal with the short-term implications of the removal of notifications and figure out ways to regain traction, as they always do. The entire time it’s important for developers operating on the Facebook Platform realize: this is Facebook’s world. If you don’t want to put up with the challenges of the platform, you can just set up your application off the site.

So - for app developers a caveat. Its a jungle out there - and its their jungle, not yours. As an ecosystem matures, life is probably going to be nasty, as the interests of customer and ecosystem holder do not align with that of the developer once the Ecosystem is functioning. Its also going to be brutish, as its about who gets (a lot of) the money, and - if you are a funding VC you will need to take this into consideration - its probably going to be short. In this eat-or-be-eaten world, there is probably only one App in each category that can sell itself to the Ecosystem, the others will have real problems surviving.

Article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly on The IOT, its interesting insofar as McKinsey looks at it with a bit more economic responsibility than many. Expurgated version:

Information and analysis

1. Tracking behavior

When products are embedded with sensors, companies can track the movements of these products and even monitor interactions with them. Business models can be fine-tuned to take advantage of this behavioral data. Some insurance companies, for example, are offering to install location sensors in customers’ cars. That allows these companies to base the price of policies on how a car is driven as well as where it travels. Pricing can be customized to the actual risks of operating a vehicle rather than based on proxies such as a driver’s age, gender, or place of residence.

2. Enhanced situational awareness

Data from large numbers of sensors, deployed in infrastructure (such as roads and buildings) or to report on environmental conditions (including soil moisture, ocean currents, or weather), can give decision makers a heightened awareness of real-time events, particularly when the sensors are used with advanced display or visualization technologies.

3. Sensor-driven decision analytics

The Internet of Things also can support longer-range, more complex human planning and decision making. The technology requirements—tremendous storage and computing resources linked with advanced software systems that generate a variety of graphical displays for analyzing data—rise accordingly.

Automation and control

1. Process optimization

The Internet of Things is opening new frontiers for improving processes. Some industries, such as chemical production, are installing legions of sensors to bring much greater granularity to monitoring. These sensors feed data to computers, which in turn analyze them and then send signals to actuators that adjust processes—for example, by modifying ingredient mixtures, temperatures, or pressures. Sensors and actuators can also be used to change the position of a physical object as it moves down an assembly line, ensuring that it arrives at machine tools in an optimum position (small deviations in the position of work in process can jam or even damage machine tools). This improved instrumentation, multiplied hundreds of times during an entire process, allows for major reductions in waste, energy costs, and human intervention.

2. Optimized resource consumption

Networked sensors and automated feedback mechanisms can change usage patterns for scarce resources, including energy and water, often by enabling more dynamic pricing. Utilities such as Enel in Italy and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) in the United States, for example, are deploying “smart” meters that provide residential and industrial customers with visual displays showing energy usage and the real-time costs of providing it. (The traditional residential fixed-price-per-kilowatt-hour billing masks the fact that the cost of producing energy varies substantially throughout the day.) Based on time-of-use pricing and better information residential consumers could shut down air conditioners or delay running dishwashers during peak times. Commercial customers can shift energy-intensive processes and production away from high-priced periods of peak energy demand to low-priced off-peak hours.

3. Complex autonomous systems

The most demanding use of the Internet of Things involves the rapid, real-time sensing of unpredictable conditions and instantaneous responses guided by automated systems. This kind of machine decision making mimics human reactions, though at vastly enhanced performance levels. The automobile industry, for instance, is stepping up the development of systems that can detect imminent collisions and take evasive action. Certain basic applications, such as automatic braking systems, are available in high-end autos. The potential accident reduction savings flowing from wider deployment could surpass $100 billion annually. Some companies and research organizations are experimenting with a form of automotive autopilot for networked vehicles driven in coordinated patterns at highway speeds. This technology would reduce the number of “phantom jams” caused by small disturbances (such as suddenly illuminated brake lights) that cascade into traffic bottlenecks.

And the conclusion (italics are mine)?

The Internet of Things has great promise, yet business, policy, and technical challenges must be tackled before these systems are widely embraced. Early adopters will need to prove that the new sensor-driven business models create superior value. Industry groups and government regulators should study rules on data privacy and data security, particularly for uses that touch on sensitive consumer information. Legal liability frameworks for the bad decisions of automated systems will have to be established by governments, companies, and risk analysts, in consort with insurers. On the technology side, the cost of sensors and actuators must fall to levels that will spark widespread use. Networking technologies and the standards that support them must evolve to the point where data can flow freely among sensors, computers, and actuators. Software to aggregate and analyze data, as well as graphic display techniques, must improve to the point where huge volumes of data can be absorbed by human decision makers or synthesized to guide automated systems more appropriately.

Its that price thing.....we last looked at The Internet Of Things in economic detail about 2 years ago, came to the conclusion there were 2 or 3 cycles of "Moore's Law" still to go before it was cheap enough to take off. so we're looking at 2012 - 2014 before things really start to take off outside of large industries like Chemicals etc.

Interesting article from Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff about why Enterprise Social media software is so cr*p. The headline we used - "Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg" - is a quote and says it all really, but he makes some other points:

We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

We actually did quite a bit of work on the benefits of real time services in business about 2 years ago, and the issue is this - most businesses do not operate in true real time, and in fact most of the software back-end infrastructure works quickly enough most of the time - but the presentation layers to the users are just cr*p compared to modern consumer software.

But this is due to a different dynamic - when you are giving away free services to users, the User Experience is absolutely critical to takeup - which is why consumer Web 2.0 companies obsess about this. Enterprise software economics are based on getting through client ticklists, and user delight is seldom a criteria for this.

So - when user delight becomes a key differentiator in company software selection, Lotus Notes will finally be thrown out.

Here is an interesting realisation on the personal economics of LBS:

Simply: too much work and risk, too little reward.

All I got were quite a few stalker like experiences grouped with a shift of my thinking about location based services from expression of physical identity to needless ego boost.

One specific interaction really bothered me to look at the benefits of these services. I had someone look up historical data on my checkins and put themselves in places so they would ‘run into me.’ Once I switched my habits, they did as well (that is when I figured it out).

Their response: ‘well, you put it out there.’

I did. I opted in to getting stalked. From a stalkers point of view, this is a goldmine. Foursquare for example lists the picture and location of recently crowned mayors on their homepage. Here is a picture of someone, with the address of the place they usually hang out. I find that troubling, especially for someone just wanting to share with friends.

So Whoddathunkit? Well, us for a start - we predicted it (see here) and the diagram we drew at the time (see above) shows why - the top right hand corner is the best for the service providers but not for users.

Quid Est Demonstratum.

Now what annoys me is that this sort of stuff is fairly trivial to predict (Human nature + low cost access to voyeuristic levels of private data), so one can't pretend that it came out the blue as a total surprise. And this example is pretty mild re its outcome - if you take what you can do with pervasive LBS to its logical conclusions you can get some far more risky behaviours.

To be clear - I am not against Location Based services, just the types designed to operate in the top right corner which really are a "stalkers charter". As Stowe Boyd points out, you can use services with lower resolution. And as our chart above shows, the best services for their users lie in other quadrants, but of course these are harder to monetise via Ad-serving and datamining.

My greater concern is that the next generation of LBS will be game based, which will tempt (typically younger and naive people) to disclose even more information, as no doubt these games will reward people for behaviour that hands over more and more personal data (see analysis here).

Our privacy is being sold down the river, I am coming to the view that the only way to sort these abuses out before they go too far is via pre-emptive legal restrictions.

About a year ago the Long Beach Civic Hall was full of people chanting "Raw Data Now" - it was Sir Tim (Berners Lee, not Rice) at TED making an evangelical case for the freedom of data that the taxpayer essentially funds.

Well, clearly crowd sourcing like this works, and those of us who were there from the UK must have shouted loudest - as today the UK government opens a fairly impressive raft of data - BBC:

A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.

The target is to kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information.

Its on www.data.gov.uk

A beta version has been going since September, which has a number services - it will kick off today with 2,500 datasets. One of the main barriers is to get geographical location from the Ordnance Survey (OS) free. This is still paid for and thus prevents a number of location based mashups, the darling of the day.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has also announced the city's authorities will open an online data warehouse on 29 January with more than 200 data sets relevant to life in the capital.

This is a Good Thing, and hopefully more will become available - its my view that if this is done a whole lot of services -unimaginable today - will emerge to remove many frictions in our life today. I hope it also helps sort out the many small contradictions in the various systems.

From a WSJ article on VC spend, it would seem that capital intensive technology such as networking equipment, telecommunications, semiconductors, solar and alternative fuels are not getting any money - two snippets:

"We're preoccupied by capital efficiency," said Bob Ackerman, a venture capitalist at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto. "You look at the capital requirements and risk-reward ratio [for areas such as clean technology] and it becomes very, very difficult."

Preoccupied by the low spend and quick buck in other words. Not sure the risk/reward ratio in easy-to-reproduce services is any better though, but I guess you fail quicker so can redeploy any capital left faster. Fred Wilson had an interesting post on the changes in VC economics a day or so ago.

Then there is:

Navin Chaddha, a venture capitalist at Mayfield Fund, said his firm was interested in investing in online education, online health care and cloud computing this year, but was shunning capital-intensive industries such as biofuels. And he is being choosier in areas like networking, storage and telecommunications. "You have to be selective" and look for disruptive innovations in those fields, he said.

Cloud computing not capital intensive? Somebody's been selling Snake Oil to those nice VC chaps again I suppose if its only defined as Free-to-use-and-f*ck-all SLA consumer presentation layer web services sitting on top of the big iron then it isn't, but last time I looked Cloud Computing of any form of industrial quality had big transport, hosting and middleware requirements that ain't solved yet.

Update - good counterpoint by Ovum's Vuk Trifkovic pointing out that Cloud is capital intensive, but not as capital intensive as some of the others mentioned.

Whjch prompts a further thought - In theory capital intensiveness raises barriers to entry, reducing competition and lengthening the time a market leader has in the sun. Also, when all is said and done the patents are easier to protect. Perhaps that explains Cloud's popularity for "WebTech" VCs, despite it being pretty ephemeral right now as fa as deplyability is concerned - its the affordable face of capital intensive infrastructure industries.

And that prompts a further aha - its mainly large companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) that are building the infrastructure layers right now.

Update II - but, on my side of te argument, note that Facebook is now building its own datacentres. That, dear reader, is Capital Intensive!

Jeff Jarvis quoting his column in the Grauniad on Buzzmachine, about News International stopping blogs linking to its pages:

Linking is more than merely a function and feature of the internet. Linking is a right. The link enables fair comment. It powers the link economy that will sustain media. It is a tool for accountability. It is the keystone to free speech online.

A number of major assertions there, which if unpicked present a different picture to that assumed:

- Linking is a right: No, in reality nothing is a "right" unless it can be enforced. To enforce something requires effort, which needs resources. A right that is un-resourced is more likely to go away. The Link Economy is unresourced.

- The Link enables Fair Comment: No, you can still do fair comment without direct linking. For example, I don't have to link this post to Jeff's - I can just tell everyone on Twitter who follows me, and they can tell their friends etc etc. You could argue that those Twitter followers are also links, but they ain't a right - and Twitter allows linking as part of a business model (which, like the Link Economy, is still not making money directly) not as a Liberty International sponsored humanitarian project.

- It powers the link economy that will sustain media - Links power an Ecosystem, but that doesn't mean its a viable Economy. The whole reason that News International et al are putting up paywalls is that the Link Economy does not sustain their media costs, in fact their experience is that it drains it of cash and hands it to other people's media - mainly the search engines. The Link Economy does not sustain this blog either for example, despite it having the circulation of a fairly large "dead tree" technical magazine and lots of lovely people who link to it. What sustains this blog is the Real Economy, which subsidises my time to write it with cold, hard cash earned elsewhere. The only people making money out of the Link Economy are either writing about it and selling good old fashioned (non linkable) paper books, or purloining and aggregating other people's content without paying much (if anything) for it and then setting up low cost display Ads against it. And Google has the search Ad game just about sewn up.

- It is a tool for accountability - How so? If you write it, and I can't link to it, but I rail about it anyway (like here) to my followers, how are you less accountable? Google will tell you what I've done, Link Economy or no. Now, my post may be more popular if there are lots of links to it, so more people may read it but as I noted above, I have other channels.

- It is the key to Free Speech Online - well, no. Being able to argue about the Link Economy on this blog without any censorship or interference is the key to free speech online, regardless of whether I link or not. And I can write this blog because I can pay for a web hoster and my time with real cash etc etc

Where Jeff is right is when he tells you what links really are - a distribution mechanism:

linking is distribution; it is a benefit. That’s why I argue News Corp is a fool not to welcome, encourage and exploit links to its content. Links do not stop people from reading it; links bring readers to it.

The thing is, a distribution mechanism is not necessarily an "Economy". News International and most Newspapers have welcomed, encouraged and exploited links to their content over the last few years, but found out that not enough money flowed down those channels to make it worthwhile carrying on with. In other words, having a distribution mechanism is all very well, but if it costs more than it earns it is unaffordable. Hence the paywalls going up. They have nearly all - after several years experience - calculated that a small % of people with real money is worth more than a virtual fortune in link-whuffie volumes.

In summary then, linking is an Ecosystem. Its nice to have, but its not necessary for free speech etc etc so long as other alternatives exist, and the"Link Economy" is totally lousy at making money for everyone, except link aggregators (ie Google) and those who can sell a non copyable good via it.

Of course, no Noo Media polemic is complete without a call to the Cluetrain manifesto:

We in the media tend to view the internet in our own image. But the internet is not a medium. Instead, as Cluetrain Manifesto author Doc Searls argues, it is a place. Think of it as a public park. You may not be selectively kept out because of your association with a race, religion … or aggregator. “Linking,” says Bartlett, “is a common public amenity.”

Actually, a public park is a very good analogy here. Link Economics is like someone looking at a park and saying "gee, we can use all this space for free - isn't that cool - lets build a New Economy from this". But what you don't see is that a public park is funded by taxing the the local companies and people, for free enjoyment of the park by them as a common good. If we were to really run the Link Economy as a public park, we would tax all the users of the park to pay for its services.

But everyone except the dyed-in-the-Kool-Aid idealists really know The Link Economy is largely bankrupt, which is why they are paying lip service (to get said idealists to proselytise their services) but the real game is getting the data about your behaviour and money. So next link along the chain is that Privacy is Dead:

I fear that what is really in danger here is the doctrine of openness* on which journalism and an informed society depend. Pertinent are the arguments around Google’s Streetview, which takes pictures of buildings and the people who happen to be in front of them. Some object that these photos violate their privacy. But they are in public. What they do there is public.

I understand that people caught on Streetview might not want us to see them strolling into a drug den or brothel.

Jeff defines open-ness roughly as the public's right to access. And I totally agree with that, for public things. Like public services, public buildings, public people etc etc.

But Public Open-ness and personal privacy are two very different things. Privacy is my control of what I reveal about myself. I object to Google Streetview because I don't want every Tom, Dick or Harry peering through my front windows. People are obfuscating one issue to force entry into the other, because linking to and mining your data is where the money is. And as danah boyd noted yesterday, those Social Mediarati with real power and money embrace privacy, while removing it from the hoi polloi who use their services. If privacy is good enough for Larry, Sergei, Eric, Zuck et al but not good enough for me, then guess who the sucker is?.

But of course this is anathema and we must castigate the unbelievers - like silly old Rupert, who is just not drinking his Kool-Aid:

As Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed response to Rupert Murdoch on the value of search and aggregation, it’s up to the recipient of the link to take advantage of the relationship it creates – and Google creates 4bn such opportunities for publishers a year.

Actually, Google gets in-between those 4bn transactions a year, serves a low budget Ad, and sucks nearly all the value out of the transaction before the MediaCo even sees it. If Eric was right, Rupert would see money flowing in to his coffers, not out. But of course boring old Rupert just doesn't get it:

In the end, this fight is over control. News Corp is desperately trying to maintain its control over access to and packaging and pricing of information that now flows freely from many sources. Thanks to the internet, it is losing it – in more than one sense.

Actually, its not about Control. Its about Making Money. And if other "New Media" had worked out where Rupert was truly wrong we'd see a host of organisations rushing ahead. What the Link Economy buys you, by and large, is the Huffington Post model - a system that makes enough money to afford a few full timers and a large string of freelancers - "free" here referring to what they are being paid, more or less.

Thus, an open and public-spirited suggestion for Newspaper Editors, Media Strategists etc who are genuinely trying to turn around media company fortunes. Its just a bloody distribution channel, and its a low value one for low value media at the moment, unless you can be an aggregator of very large amounts of low value transactions.

(This is not to say that News International will win, as the major issue is getting paid for valuable content creation - its just that the Link Economy is not the path to media richness for those sort of companies as it stands)

So the next time someone pops up burbling on about how "the Link Economy" will save you if only you could embrace it, its best to de-link from them before any serious damage is done

It just had to happen - Economist:

The mainframe may well find a new home in corporate computing clouds, the pools of data-processing capacity many firms are building. Many companies are also increasingly interested in buying simpler, more integrated computer systems, even if this means a higher price. Reacting to this, IBM’s rivals are making bets on mainframe-like products. On January 13th HP and Microsoft announced a pact to come up with tight packages of hardware and software. Brad Day of Forrester Research, another market-research group, puts it thus: “We are on the way back to the future.”

Of course, the end of the mainframe was spelled by users taking control of their data and applications on their own smart local devices, free from the interference of central wizards and unreliable, unresponsive central systems.

Perish the thought that history would repeat itself - after all, as the Google/China incident has most recently shown, nothing can go wrong in the Cloud...click...go wrong in the Cloud..click...

Move over Mary Meeker - another Merchant Bank looks like its set to take the Optimistic Overpromotion Crown - Read Write Web:

......we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

This beats the previous record by Gartner, of $150bn by 2013

One sometimes has to laugh about the estimates by the "Analysis" companies and the Merchant Banks. What they all by and large have is a database with the basic IT components and their estimated growth over N years based on various factor assumptions, by country, by sector etc. They then re-group these component bits together and re-brand them whenever a new "New Thing" like SOA or SaaS or Cloud Computing hits the Hype Curve (pouring the same old wine into new hype bottles). Thus the market forecast for Tech A (Virtualisation, say) moves seamlessly from SOA to SaaS to Cloud, and they make (ever changing) estimates of penetration.

The aim, typically, is to flatter and deceive. Very seldom are the early estimates under-declared, usually (well, nearly always) the early estimates are massively over-egged and then are scaled back as the newly hyped area doesn't quite make it. Mobile is usually the worst.

The game continues in ever increasing cycles over time.......when the whole "New ASP" (remember Application Service Provision - it was the Word 1.0 for Cloud) game started in c 2004 the memory of the abject failure of ASP kept the estimates still "respectably" low. Looking at past Gartner, Forrester reports etc I have, SaaS was to be a $20 - 40bn game (ASP was a $20 - $40bn game at its most breathless). SOA later was to be a c $60- 90 bn game (depending on who/when the report is from) but the inflation of each cycle goes up, till we get into the Clouds.

And each time a new term is coined, the old term's stuff is quietly shifted over. Never clearly of course, so its always difficult to sort out what is which, when.

And each time they fail to live up to promises, and each time its due to the same reason too - its very hard to:

- provision server side software reliably enough for enterprises' critical applications
- persuade them that their data is secure
- design systems flexible enough for every enterprise's different needs

So each time, after some fairly non critical stuff is "Clouded out" it stops there. Then there is the inevitable Large F*ck Up or Service Level Argument or attempt to extort an above market annual maintenance agreement increase, and the enterprise CIO makes a strategic decision to take it back in house.

That's the same CIO that the next saleperson is trying to persuade to let it all hang out in the Cloud, by the way......


For the record, $160bn is about 12% of the total ICT marketplace excluding pure comms and (a movable figure, for sure, but its of the order of $1.3 trillion), so do we really believe Cloud will go from zero to c 12% in about, oh, 2 years - given its still relatively tiny today, 2 years in?

Good article by Tim O'Reilly on the strong trends by various players to try and re-wall the Web - firstly by players with monopolies :

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

He also covers the Google/News International spat:

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

In fact, we've been arguing for a while that the hoo-hah over Net Neutrality is overdone, and the real emerging monopolists are upstream at the aggregation level (Google Neutrailty anyone?) and downstream at the device level. News International can be seen as a Content player trying to fight free of Aggregator monopoly (and form its own little power base, of course). Now to an extent this has all happened before.

To explain, if I may - at the top of this post is a good old 4-market model. In the 1990's the Internet came out tops over a bunch of walled Online Service Providers (OSPs) who were trying to be monopolists (or at least warring oligopolists) at the Aggregation Layer. But it won only because of some strong forces helping it.

Firstly the distributors - Telcos (those people everyone accuses of Net Un-neutrality now) were totally neutral in allowing anyone with a modem to connect to anyone. Secondly, at the time the main consumer device players (Apple, Microsoft) were provider-neutral in that they allowed you to connect to AOL or Prodigy or the 'Net. Thirdly, content was neutral in that AOL et al - despite trying - could not lock up the content online.

The issue now is that the monopolist forces are operating at the aggregation layer again, but also trying to build end to end walled gardens, from content to device. (Think Apple i-Series, Google's various forays from content to mobile phone)

Now Tim thinks that Microsoft will play the role of Open champion, when he says:

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

He also mentions IBM - they too would probably be better off with the Open web. In fact, the Distribution players - those guys the Net Neutralists love to hate - may well prove to be part of the Good Guys in this scenario as their interests align more with those who want to keep the device and aggregation levels open.

But I suspect that strong legislation - and a lot of user campaigning the like of which would make the Net Neutrality debate look like a coffee morning - is also required. But forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.