Collaboration is the Killer App
A bulk of what's happening on the Web right now can be characterized as retrofitting...remaking software to fit within the framework of the Web. And the framework of the Web is a network, and what people do in networks (of all kinds) is collaborate.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-stream in the Web 2.0 argument that O'Reilly framed five months earlier with Harnessing Collective Intelligence: both treat the network itself, not any single application, as the platform where value accumulates. Where O'Reilly emphasized aggregating user contributions, Bokardo narrows the lens to what people actually do in networks — collaborate — and reads the wave of 'retrofitting' desktop software into browser-based services as evidence.
The thesis traveled within the same blog-cluster conversation rather than the mainstream press: Read/WriteWeb picked it up the same week amid its polling of readers on Google-era Web 2.0 claims, which signals the debate over what the Web 'is' was being contested outlet-by-outlet among practitioners.
First-order effects
- Developers and publishers retrofitting single-user desktop applications into hosted services must now design for multiple simultaneous participants — sharing state between users becomes a core product requirement rather than an optional export feature.
Second-order effects
- Incumbents whose products were built around an installed, offline footprint face pressure to expose their data to other services through the browser, because the web-native rivals can win on collaboration even when matching them on features.
Third-order effects
- If the retrofit pattern holds, distribution and lock-in migrate from shrink-wrapped installs to hosted accounts and shared data stores — the durable moat shifts toward whoever operates the collaborative layer, an early statement of how [[a:/concepts#interoperability-shifts-the-moat|interoperability shifts the moat]].
The trend: Mid-2000s software strategy is reorganizing around the network as platform: value accrues to whoever hosts collaboration and shared data, not whoever ships the installer.