Stop the Metaphors!

Rich McManus says the Web is a platform, and reports that per Arrington, it’s an OS. I think this whole menagerie of metaphors around the Web has never been helpful and we should just stop dreaming them up. The Web isn’t a platform or a database or an API or an OS a cloud or a clickstream or any other of those things. In fact, the Web isn’t even a thing, it’s a mesh of agreements with a nice straightforward engineering rulebook. Play by the rules and you can be part of it and build something great, struggle against them and you’ll look lame and you’ll fail. But don’t try to analogize it; sometimes the world has new things in it and you just have to deal with them as they are.