Lost in the Cloud – NYT Op-ed.

He makes a good point re: potential effect of the cloud on innovation:

“But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox. … This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software.”

Lost in the Cloud
By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN

Zittrain is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It and will be a keynote speaker at the AALL conference which I’ll be attending over the next few days in Washington, DC.