This remarkable statement was made yesterday by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch provides the quote:

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.

The beauty of this statement is in its simplicity, and it harmoniously resonates as the ultimate truth, the fundamental core of all that is disrupting media these days.

This is because we’re too busy building our own “platforms” to see that it’s just not enough. It will never be enough, because the Web IS the platform.

It’s also important to note that this philosophy describes the major difference between Google and Yahoo!, the latter choosing to develop their own platform and work within it, while the former views the entire Web as their platform. Who do you think is going to be the most successful? And I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is the issue that media companies face with the Yahoo! consortium.

For long-term viability, it’s vital that local media companies view their “platform” as the Local Web and not just a monolithic portal (or even just a series of sites) that they call their own.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 10:11 am and is filed under Media 2.0, Disruptions, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.