Public Computing and the Next Gang-of-Four →
The “Gang of Four” theory is one of the most interesting features of the modern consumer IT industry. In an article in TechCrunch in May, Eric Schonfeld sketched out the basic idea:
Every technology era has its four horsemen driving growth and innovation. In the 1990s it was Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, and Dell. Today, there is a new “gang of four,” as Google chairman Eric Schmidt puts it. They are Google (of course), Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and they are behind the consumer revolution on the Internet today.
Is the Gang of Four phenomenon real? In what way? Under what conditions do such gangs appear? When do membership shifts occur in the gang? Can we find the same dynamic in the brick-and-mortar world?
When you apply the Gang-of-Four theory and attempt to predict the future, you get an interesting conclusion: the next epoch of computing, dominated by a new Gang of Four, will be public computing. So the progression goes: personal computing, social computing, public computing. Too glib? Try my arguments on for size and decide for yourself.
-Venkatesh Rao, from his The Electronic Leviathan blog on Forbes.com
