Tim O'Reily looks through the other side of the prism of connectivity and commoditization in The Open Source Paradigm Shift. I characterized it as a challenge to the end-user public, to roll our own commodity networks. Tim speaks to businesspeople, enouraging them to find markets at the edges while contributing to the "Internet operating system" in the middle.

The way to get there isn't necessarily for all businesses to become commodity businesses, but for businesses to ensure that the commodities they need are produced in sufficient quantities for all. Even if the end-user benefits from this commoditization are "mere" externalities, they're benefits all the same.

I have a simple test that I use in my talks to see if my audience of computer industry professionals is thinking with the old paradigm or the new. "How many of you use Linux?" I ask. Depending on the venue, 20-80% of the audience might raise its hands. "How many of you use Google?" Every hand in the room goes up. And the light begins to dawn. Every one of them uses Google's massive complex of 100,000 Linux servers, but they were blinded to the answer by a mindset in which "the software you use" is defined as the software running on the computer in front of you. Most of the "killer apps" of the Internet, applications used by hundreds of millions of people, run on Linux or FreeBSD. But the operating system, as formerly defined, is to these applications only a component of a larger system. Their true platform is the Internet.