The internet boom of the late nineties saw many winners and losers. Some of the big winners were companies such as Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay and Google. These exemplified the changing technology and the new ways it allowed those businesses to not only reach customers, but to allow other customers, to reach their customers. This is the many-to-many economic model. It would not be possible without the rise of the decentralised data network, the http protocol, and the internet web browser. The market success of this economic model has ramifications for representative democracy.

Netscape Navigator

The web browser has quite a bizarre economic history, it commoditised the desktop, but managed to commoditise itself in the process. Nowadays it is taken for granted that an operating system will come with a free web browser bundled in. Only eight years ago, browsers and winsocks were on separate CDROMs.

The capacity of the web browser to commoditise the desktop, and make it irrelevant was realised by Microsoft after they watched the internet take off under their oblivious feet. Microsoft was slow to the market, but used their monopoly on in operating system to try and commoditise the browser itself. They developed their Internet Explorer and gave it away for free with the Microsoft Windows operating system.

It took Microsoft several version of Internet Explorer to compete with Netscape Navigator. Netscape itself was flush with cash from an IPO, its founders and backers were inordinately wealthy through starting the Silicon Valley software boom. They entered new markets, but were unable to compete against more professional engineering products. Their 4.x Navigator software was released in alphas and betas to the world. Which gave Netscape a name for bugginess.

Finally Netscape released their code as opensource, unable to compete against Microsoft's monopoly, its strong arming of OEMs to exclude Netscape, and Internet Explorer price point of free. The world got to look at poorly written software. It was bad enough that it was junked, and the opensource Mozilla project, started again, rewriting a browser from scratch. This meant that Internet Explorer had the run of the market for several years.

Commodity markets are never static, they soon innovate at a rapid pace. This has left Microsoft languishing behind. Their browser is now the most inferior of all the browsers in the market. Soon Internet Explorer was competing with the Mozilla Suite and its spinoff of Firefox. The KDE project developed khtml which is the basis for the opensource Konquerer, and underpins Apple's Safari browser. Another perky company from Norway released the innovative Opera browser, which is managing to make money in a commodity market with a price point of zero.

Innovating To Capture Customers

The freeing of software from the platform, and as a result business and consumer interaction, has allowed many-to-many companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon etc to innovate for their customers, rather than waste energy, time and money on building to a platform. Compare the game software industry to the internet companies. Much money, time and contractual exclusivity is wasted in meeting the competing platforms. A game company must decide to write for the PC, for the Playstation, for the Nintendo, for the XBox.

Yahoo writes for the internet, and whatever medium data will travel across. I can read Yahoo on my browser, or with my blackberry. If I want to play Zelda I have to buy a Nintendo, but if I want to play Final Fantasy I have to buy a Playstation. With big titles like Grand Theft Auto I have a choice of PC or Playstation. But the game companies are limited by the platforms they meet, just as the consumer is limited in titles by the platform they own. With Amazon, or Ebay, the platform does not matter, it is the interaction with the customer that is all important, and where their development time and money is spent.

Google's recent Talk software is interesting, as this moves them from platform independence into meeting platforms. It is a step backwards. At the moment you can only download it for PC. Their google bar is the same, it splits between Internet Explorer and Firefox. In other words those two software products are platform dependent and place them at the mercy of the platform developers. Mozilla is probably not so bad, but Microsoft has a history of avoiding competition through unethical and illegal methods.

Welcome to 1997 Joel

Joel Spolsky is well known and popular technology commentator, who sees the world through a Microsofties eyes. last year he had a widely commented on epiphany, in where he got that the browser made the desktop, and its APIs irrelevant for many products . That he is coming to this realisation in 2004 is quite remarkable. Considering that Amazon and Ebay had built amazing businesses, revenue and fortunes around the commoditisation of the desktop and browser.

Back in 1997, several web framework started to mature, Sun's Java Servlets were released, mod_perl was maturing, as were several other methodologies like CGI. There was nothing stopping developers from making rich applications through a central server and a client's web browser. Using HTML collapsed the learning curve individuals had to go through to use the website, forms remain a very limited subset of functionality. As a result they differ little from website to website, unlike desktop system which can vary in an abnormally volatile manner from system to system.

I have worked on several many-to-many software systems that started out as being desktop based, or incorporated some minor web functionality to interact with client, and then did most of the heavy lifting on the desktop. Without exception, all of these have now been migrated entirely to the web browser. One system I developed in 1998 contained approximately 25% of functionality through the web at initial deployment. Within twelve months the desktop component was decommissioned. The users and clients demanded that it all be on the web. It is a richer, more consistent interface, that can be used from anywhere. The desktop, quite literally, cannot compete.

That being said, there are horses for courses, I would not do image editing, or video recording through a website. That remains the domain of the desktop. But the many-to-many business models are unachievable through the desktop, they can only be done through the internet, and the web browser. This raises possibilities for representative democracy which is itself a many-to-many model. Companies have refined the process, which gives potential for representative democracy to incorporate these technologies.

Political Ramifications

Representative Government is a political method and deliberative process that was developed during a time when education was scarce, and communications were exceptionally slow. We now live in a time where the average citizen is nearly as well educated as the Prime Minister, or any other representative. Wisdom is no longer the exclusive domain of the politicians, or the elite. The stock market is a good example of this, the wisdom of the crowd out-performs fund managers, who are supposedly specially educated in choosing winners.

Communications have gone through a revolution. Citizens have access to the same level of communications, and speed of communications as government does. In addition encryption, and processing power have commoditised so that citizens can compete with the wealth and resources of government in these areas as well. The pyramid nature of representative government is getting chewed away at, through the development of humanity and the commoditisation of technology.

The expectation is the non-specialist roles of government will be consumed by the citizens, chosen through sortition and acting as juries in parliament for either a single issue, or for an extended period across many issues. The many-to-many nature of representative democracy need no longer be the exclusive domain of individuals representing a district and party. Those districts can, for many issues, represent themselves.

Government has a history of ignoring innovation, preferring to collapse more power to itself and make more and more of its input and output private. Shielding it from the public. It is ironic that the people, markets and technology have gone the opposite way, making more of our lives public, and leaving our interactions, almost permanently in plain view. There is a tension here that will need to be resolved.

The many-to-many business model has been developed in the last ten years is not only viable, but the pillar of strength in many markets. Technology has enabled this happen in an efficient, and global manner. it is for the health of government, and the people, that these innovations start entering the political system.

cam

More Reading on Many-to-many

• Many-to-Many
• Commoditisation
• Government
• Tail Economics Meets Political Activism
• The Economic Rise of Many-to-Many Systems and Their Political Ramifications