Ray Ozzie rocks, no doubt about it, but he's evidently not immune from the particularly virulent strain of "blind to the world" endemic to Redmond. Take this bit quoted at Techcrunch: "Just imagine the possibilities enabled by centralized configuration and personalization and remote control of all your devices from just about anywhere. Just imagine the convenience of unified data management..."

Just imagine? Those of us building cross platform web-aps live in that world right now! Our imaginations have long given way to implementation. Right now, you can program your TV via the web using the ffwd service and our first two client application prototypes (the PC client and the Wii client). Soon we'll be adding a mobile client (preview your program choices in transit) and a social client (watch what your friends have or will watch). By the end of this year we plan to have a full featured API that will let developers create clients for ANY standards-based, Internet-enabled device.

He then goes on to talk about "...the transparent synchronization of files, folders, documents, and media. The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch.

Synch? What's there to sync when every device is using the same data repository? The the web-at-large multi-directionally handles its native "documents" (HTML), "folders" (XML feeds), "media" (Embeds) using the "file" system of URLs. Perhaps Microsoft (and now Ray's) problem is that none of those web natives are created using Microsoft software. The simple solution is to include with Vista the equivalent of a dot-Mac account (which I would support if only because it may push Apple to do the same).

So what is so important that I make fun of Microsoft for being blind to it? In the world at large, the PC (personal computer) is dying on two fronts:

1. The primary copy of our new data is more likely to live on a public server that on a personal device (eg. Flickr, YouTube, there isn't won't be even a copy of Facebook data on a PC)
2. The computer is giving way to the Internet-enabled device. The biggest threat to Microsoft's play for the living room isn't Apple, it's the TV manufacturers who are rigging their displays with just enough to get online (btw, this article deserves it's own future post because it best describes the vision of the future ffwd enables).

I think he understood this even a little bit into his experience at Microsoft, but these new statements suggest either he since stopped paying attention, succumb to pressure to quit the Creative Commons nonsense and get on with productizing his ideas, or (and this is the most disturbing) he is building his vision with the PC (or worse, a specific OS) in mind.

Please Mr. Ozzie, for you and us, make this MESH thing conform to the values implied by this as yet unrefined and unofficial war cry of web application developers everywhere.

"give me a standards compliant browser running on good hardware and a light-weight OS and I'll do the rest."

Update April 2008: Microsoft is releasing Live Mesh to a small group,  estimating general beta before 2009

The controversial Wisdom of Crowds concept popularized by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki has come under fresh criticism. In March  The Economist, Newsweek, Bryan Caplan (author of the Myth of the Rational Voter), and Danny Dover all came out against the idea. Here's a few choice quotes:

The Econmist on Wikipedia: "there is a limit to how much information a group of predominantly non-specialist volunteers, armed with a search engine, can create and edit he Economist on Wikipedia"

Danny Dover on the the fickleness of the mob

Bryan Caplan at SxSW: "The miracle of aggregation fails and it fails very directly."

Newsweek quoting Jason Calcanis: "The wisdom of the crowds has peaked"

These would be damning cases of failure...if they were relevant. In reality, they only illustrate how difficult it is to make a crowd in to a wise crowd because  crowds in general lack one of the following characteristics of a wise crowd: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, intelligent aggregation, emotional balance.  To wit, the economist article  is really a bunch of illustration of how Wikipedia  is too centralized and politicizes aggregation. Likewise Danny Dover and Bryan Caplan's criticisms are on failures of emotion or stupid aggregation.

To put it another way, I disagree with both Jason's premise and conclusion. Web 2.0 was not about the wisdom of crowds. It was about crowds genearlly (social networks), a few somewhat wise, but none fully and intentionally so. Therefore, I conclude that Web 3.0 is a race between the return of experts (Mahalo) and attempts to wrangle the web 2.0 crowds into their wise form (Delver).