Author Geoffrey Moore mapped out the march towards a services-oriented world from a product-oriented business and technology architecture, a transition that brings us to more orderly solutions but a very messy transition. Models like Google that are services-oriented are thriving like now, but things change, Geoffrey notes, so hang on. The "uber movement" Geofrey sees in technology is computing moving into the network, a long march that may take a decade or two in his mind. Major technology companies such as SAP are putting in big bets on services-oriented software architectures, but he sees the transition as inherently slow. On the Web side, though, with the "digitization of everything," the media model is becoming the dominant model for software. Google gives away what Microsoft sells, making it hard for Microsoft to change their company's DNA away from unit sales. It also hangs heavily on Microsoft's enterprise sales, which are more about content and solutions also. Content is also much less proprietary, expanding its media model into broader spaces. Geographical evolution is Geoffrey's third major evolution. The U.S. marketplace is no longer the center of global commerce, with "the economic torch crossing the Pacific," much in the same way that the torch was pass to America from Europe across the Atlantic in an earlier era. From the standpoint of world peace this is all good, as middle classes empowered by a consumer economy value stability - as does the economy that supports them. Software developers used to think that they were protected from these trends, but innovation is something that's earned, not a given. "We don't play away games well," Geoffrey notes, reminding us that the U.S. needs to expand its global outlook and to drop a culture of entitlement to respond to unentitled challengers.

In education and publishing there are great opportunities for innovation if they can get beyond senses of entitlement and become more entrepreneurial, Geoffrey notes. He sees entrepreneurialism's "I don't give a damn" attitude being able to outstrip public policy in fostering innovation. This is a familiar rant, but I am not sure that I agree wholeheartedly with this outlook. The open source movement in a certain way is about "the commons" being entitled to access to common resources. Perhaps it's individual entitlement that's threatened, where people come together to get what they want for themselves. Perhaps it's more the case that discriminatory entitlement that's threatened.

I am also not so sure about the public policy side of Geoffrey's argument. If one thinks of the Chinese economy you have very strong dictation of public policy that is fostering an entrepreneurial environment - in a formula that's perhaps not what many of us would want, but nevertheless offers clear guidelines. U.S. industrial policy at the current time lags in servicing the needs of entrepreneurs and innovators, favoring companies that have more to lose than to gain from innovation. Entrepreneurs do not have the leverage to lobby a political system that at the current time responds to less innovative voices. Public policy does not need to be intrusive but it needs to set a stage in which the rules of the game are truly in the interest of a healthy marketplace. Without those policies, innovation will go elsewhere - as will tomorrow's profits.

One good idea Geoffrey had was to go for differentiation rather than trying to be "best in class" - kind of a "long tail" for business. In other words, context brings you past many of the economies of scale and gets us back to a village-like economic exchange, a peer-to-peer economy.