Comment by Lammy
8 days ago
They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402
“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?
A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.
Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”
While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.
Those people didn't chooso Big Tech; they chose the path of least resistance to getting themselves online and in front of as many eyeballs as possible, because Big Tech stacked the deck over many decades to make it that way.
Who is "they"?
How the hell should I know? Do you have any comments on Mr. Ellison's interview, or are you just here to nitpick my wording?
It's not nitpicking. I read the quote and I don't see anything about "planning this outcome", so I took that as something you added, so I asked you.
He's zipping around between topics and I would have said websites already fulfill what he's talking about.