Who Will Rule The New Internet?

Correction Appended: June 6, 2008

Take what man makes and use it,
But do not worship it,
For it shall pass.

An anonymous wit scratched those lines on the side of a junked car door and lugged it to a trail near my home in Northern California. The middle of a pristine, ancient redwood grove is the wrong place to find a rusted-out car door, but the words magically transformed the thing from an aggravating piece of junk into art. I Googled the quote as soon as I got home, of course, but found nothing. (Thanks to Google, we live in a world where "I don't know" has become an unacceptable response. So my inability to identify the author there is driving me crazy.)

My town is pretty close to Silicon Valley, and most of my neighbors make their living in technology, while I make mine writing about it. All of us, though, worship at the altar of bright and shiny things. These days, it's the impending launch of Apple's next-generation iPhone that has the faithful davening. If the whispers of pending miracles are to be believed, this new phone could end up becoming the next big "platform."

A platform, to computer people, is the software code on which third-party applications function. There are scores of big platforms out there—something like three dozen in the international mobile-phone business alone. But a truly successful one can extend far beyond its immediate group of users and effectively create and control an enormous market. In the computer industry, IBM dominated the first commercial platform with its expensive mainframes and operating systems, aimed at corporate users. Seemingly overnight, IBM was supplanted by Microsoft and its Windows operating system as the PC revolution took hold. Windows, in turn, is now losing its power as the Web—owned by no one, accessible to all—becomes the dominant platform. (Yes, the Web is nothing more than a big layer of code; all those websites we visit are merely applications that sit atop it.)

Every major player in Techland wants to create the next great platform, of course. What's new here is that it's possible for any number of them to succeed. "Among the things that are different from the old status quo is the idea that one will win," says Marc Andreessen, who helped write the first widely adopted browser, Mosaic, which popularized the Web. The Internet is a much larger playing field than PC operating systems. "Trying to decide which will win," Andreessen adds, "is kind of like debating whether beef, chicken or lobster is going to win the market for food."

Still, for wonks like me, it's been riveting to watch three of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley—each representing a fundamental phase of the information era—battle it out. Apple, Google and Facebook are, respectively, an icon from the pioneering days of personal computers; the biggest, most profitable company yet born on the Web; and a feisty upstart whose name is synonymous with the current migration to social networks.

In many ways, these companies are technology's standard-bearers, though their guiding philosophies differ. Google, for instance, advocates an "open" Web and tends to push for open standards and alliances among developers. Facebook, with its gated community of 70 million active users, offers a more controlled experience and, so far at least, wants to keep its users safely within its walls. Apple comes from the old world. Its elegant products cocoon customers from the chaos of the information age, but the Apple experience tends to be highly controlled, with Apple hardware at the end points and Apple software and services, like the iTunes Music Store, in between.

The winners of the platform wars stand to make billions selling devices, selling eyeballs to advertisers, selling services such as music, movies, even computer power on demand. Yet the outcome here is far more important than who makes the most money. The future of the Internet—how we get information, how we communicate with one another and, most important, who controls it—is at stake.

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