I’ve seen Ray Ozzie speak a number of times and one of his favorite catchphrases that he reuses is “standing on the shoulder of giants”, and it’s starting to become a trending topic with Ev from Twitter too. Here’s why Ev should be looking up (and down) when he’s standing on people’s shoulders.
Ray normally dishes out his shoulders/giants quotes as a hat-tip to others in the software industry who have gone before him and laid the foundation for software or services that he builds, for example when talking about Groove on his blog:
“From where I've come, it's truly breathtaking in so many dimensions, and the product could never be where it is without standing on the shoulders of giants - particularly Microsoft.”
Amazon were also worthy of a mention during his PDC08 keynote last year: (although not referring to them as giants, but just standing on their shoulders :-) )
“Some months after we began to plan this new effort [Azure], Amazon launched a service called EC2, and I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their innovation and for the fact that across the industry all of us are going to be standing on their shoulders as they've established some base level design patterns, architectural models and business models that we'll all learn from and grow.”
Now it seems that Ev from Twitter has picked up the same catchphrase too! He was recently speaking on an interview on the BBC where he talked about the rise of Twitter:
“Well we stood on the shoulders of giants, said Ev, neglecting to mention he came up with Blogging (Blogger) before ‘microblogging”.
It seems like everyone is standing on other people’s shoulders right now, from an idea perspective. Of course, from a platform perspective, the idea is to get others to stand on your shoulders (e.g. Microsoft Windows, Apple’s App Store, Force.com etc.). The more people you have standing on shoulders in your pyramid the more the rely on you, and you sure as heck better make sure that you have a solid foundation free from downtime otherwise you’ll quickly amass a angry mob.
Denial of service attacks are a bitch but you can defend against them, and today’s Twitter outage was a great example of what can happen due to a well coordinated attack. Twitter is a platform with powerful APIs that have spawned loads of other software products, services and new business models.
Twitter will get there in time, I'm sure, but to be a truly great platform you have to provide reliability and stability for those who are standing on your head in your pyramid.
Image courtesy of the Chinese Allstar Acrobats Inc. – keep up the good work guys.