the onda

As we close the decade in tech, I've been reading the "2000s in summary" style articles and blog posts, amazed at how much we've gotten out of this decade. Wifi and broadband hitting a tipping point. Peer to peer. Amazon as a global powerhouse. The cloud as a viable platform. The iPod, the iPhone, and Apple's phoenix-like emergence as the dominant computer company of the 21st century. The Android alternative. The Nintendo Wii and other types of HID devices all leading to more touch, more direct manipulation, and a more seamless integration of man and machine. The AppStore, ebooks, and alternative business models for content online. OLPC and the netbook craze that it ignited. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Google as the fastest growing brand of all time and the future creche for our AI overlords.

It is hard to look at all of these products, services, and trends that have come into being over the last ten years and not be overawed. And yet, if I had to pick the vector that will have the longest lasting influence on the world, it wouldn't be any of these. Sure they are they adorn the pages of Geek People every day, and we all love to spill tons of virtual ink on them.

But at the end of the decade, the greatest single trend to emerge in the last ten years is the way in which the Internet has enabled mass scale changes in new forms of collaborative work. Of course, the poster boy for this trend is Wikipedia which has now bested both Microsoft's Encarta, and the much more venerable Britanica. But the real impact of this new style of work is much more apparent in the effects of a globally connected swarm of human minds working, not for the almighty dollar and all of the associated external incentives, but for the intrinsic rewards of mastering a craft and belonging to a community.

Its name is "Open Source—" coined at the beginning of the decade by people who were trying to differentiate this new style of working on software from the ideological free software movement. From it we have gotten Linux and Apache, MySQL and Mozilla. Today a software engineer working in one of the two platforms that actually matters (cloud and mobile) does so with the richest toolset ever available; from languages like the Perl/Python/Ruby family of dynamic languages to tons of high quality libraries to do just about everything imaginable. All because a whole load of hackers were early to this party and have spent the last 10 years showing everyone else how it is possible to work, collaborate, and belong without the explicit motivation of material wealth, the very grease of modern capitalism.

It may started in software, but as Wikipedia has shown, it will not stop there. To try to understand why, pick up my last book recommendation of the year: Daniel Pink's new brand book, "Drive," which delves much more deeply into why this new form of organized value creation works. Or subscribe to Umair Haque in your blog reader for 2010.

Happy new decade. In the midst of the economic cataclysms of the last couple years, of multiple wars of the last decade, it pays to pause for a moment and realize that there is no better time to be alive than now.