The Network Effect
Kevin Kelly argues "In the Old Economy what was rare was valuable. In the New Economy what is common is valuable." This theme is echoed in Ross in Living Networks which argues " as more people use a technology the greater the positive returns to each"

In the SWF format Macromedia gave up proprietary advantage in creating and using SWF in order to expand the pool of people who could find SWF useful... a smaller piece of a larger pie. Macromedia might have charged a royalty for each swf file produced , but that might have limited the market.

In a chart Ross plots technologies across two axes: Who creates the technology, Vs who uses it. (Playstation is created by one group and competes against other technologies created by other groups; Acrobat is mono-developed but is currently widely accepted ; Linux is group-developed but competes against similar solutions; TCP/IP is group-developed and universally accepted).

.NET the past, present and the Future

" Three years after .NET was announced with much fanfare, most of the hopes behind the .Net initiative have not been realized, and .Net has now almost vanished from Microsoft's vocabulary. This is partly due to web service protocols being still immature.

Microsoft's has decided to drop the .Net moniker from almost all product names

MS chose to implement .NET in two phases

1. Build the tools and technologies to enable developers to start building solutions

2. Teach businesses the value of Web Services and how it could greatly help them. ( A business might have an inventory management system that's home-grown in one factory and uses SAP AG in another. If they wanted to look at inventory information across a set of factories, the company has to manually build a solution. .NET was created especially to address such problems.)

It is interesting to note Macromedia Central aims to do precisely this, on a smaller scale.