Collapsing the centuries to explain now

My history teacher at high school was wise enough not to claim that the past defines the present. The valuable insight he passed on to his students was that knowledge of history would make it less like that we would repeat the mistakes of the past.

At the Reboot conference in Copenhagen earlier this summer, parallels were drawn between today and the age of the renaissance (15th century). This week, The Economist sheds light on the competitive situation between the big internet companies (Google, ebay, Yahoo, Microsoft) by relating it to Napoleonic Europe (19th century).

With the reference to Napoleon, it is tempting to tie it up with the information super-highway metaphor often used to describe the internet. Napoleon enforced the drive-on-the-right rule in the European countries his armies occupied. Which side of the road vehicles travel in a country is an open standard, and it is in the battlefield of open standards that today's winners of the internet economy should be sought.

While Google and the others are busy forging alliances it is their work on, and adherence to, open standards that in the long term will define their success. Make it easy to plug your service into other services and you will attract users not just from your current services but from other's future services as well. Inter-temporal business scalability.

Interestingly, as Sweden's history shows, if you at first back the wrong standard you can, at a cost, switch over (Sweden changed from left-hand-side driving to right in 1967 [photo by Leif Engberg found on Wikipedia]).

Tags: Google history internet renaissance Napoleon business model open standards