I've been boning up on
Kuhn's Paradigm Shift Theory of 1962
and came upon the realization that:
"I can make money off this."
So, I made some notes and came up with:
[u]Capitalizing on Paradigm Shifts[/u]
Just come up with a list of locks of things to
get in on the ground floor, inexpensively,
so as to minimize the risk and maximize the net.
Buy low. Sell high. Sooner or later.

People are going to start having "7of9" blackberry earphones/earpiece "earwigs" headsets

The coming paradigm shift in TV broadcasting - iPod

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, here's a clear definition of the phrase, which was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his ground-breaking 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

"Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It does not just 'happen', but rather it is driven by agents of change."

The paradigm shift I refer to is being driven by LUXXXCORP in response to technological, competitive and market forces, and it has three major aspects:

* End of the rat race, replaced by multi-core processor development.
* A focus on performance-per-keystroke and efficiency.
* New ways of assessing and ranking performance.





A paradigm (pronounced "paradime") is a world view. We all look at the world around us in accordance with a certain paradigm. The paradigm we use depends on what we believe is reliable and true. Scientific materialism is a very powerful paradigm that many people use today to find answers to some of the issues that face humanity.

But does this paradigm really explain our world?

We believe that it cannot and hope that this web site will help you to experience a paradigm shift that will change the way you look at the world.




Introduction

A paradigm is a world view that controls the way we understand the world in which we live. A paradigm shift occurs when the dominant paradigm is replaced by a new paradigm. Some examples of paradigm shifts are given below. One of the most significant paradigm shifts occurred in science when the paradigm that united all truth into one was replaced by a paradigm that separated the revealed truth of the Bible from scientific truth. Newton wrote that, "He was thinking God's thoughts after him.", because he saw scientific investigation as a branch of Biblical truth. This paradigm has been replaced by today's methodological naturalism. The problem with today's paradigm is that science has become the only means of determining truth. There is no way to evaluate the claims of modern science. However, we believe that there is a need to evaluate the conclusions of scientists by measuring them against absolute truth as revealed to us in God's word, the Bible.

Geocentrism to Heliocentrism

In 1610 Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter and observed the orbits of four of its moons. He believed that there was a force (which we now call gravity) that keeps the moons of Jupiter in their orbits and the same force could keep the Earth's moon going around it as the Earth moved around the Sun. His observations convinced him that the Earth orbits the Sun along with the other planets. Thus Galileo refuted those who believed that the Sun and all the planets orbited the Earth. On the basis of his scientific observations Galileo became a heliocentrist.

However the consequences of this paradigm shift was even went far beyond astronomy; not so much because of the change that occurred but why it occurred and who opposed it.

The Church opposed this scientific change not because it had a biblical position but because it defended an Aristotelian system of science that stated that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Galileo and others believed that science was a higher authority than the church's. As a consequence the authority of the Bible was undermined.

Catastrophism to Gradualism

During the 17th and 18th centuries the dominant geological paradigm was catastrophism. The catastrophists, like Cuvier, believed that the geological features of the Earth were the result of many catastrophic events, one of which was the worldwide flood in the days of Noah.

However, by the end of the 18th century people were starting to propose new ideas. Hutton and Lyell were two leaders of this paradigm shift. They proposed that the geological features had not been formed quickly as the result of a series of catastrophes. Their new paradigm was one of gradual change. They argued that geological features were the result of processes that are occurring all the time. The gradual processes of erosion and deposition could if given enough time produce the many layers of sedimentary rock that the catastrophists said were formed quickly. The gradualists explained away the global flood of Noah that we read about in the Bible and other ancient writings.

Creation to Evolution

The 19th century was one in which people's confidence in the Bible was undermined. The paradigm shift in geology meant many people believed the Earth was millions of years old. The way was open for a Darwinian explanation of biological origins. The theories of evolution that where popular during the early 19th century required a lot of time. The gradualists geologists gave evolutionary theorists the time they needed. Darwin provided a mechanism for the origin of species. Natural selection could if given enough time produce all the modern species of plant and animal. There was no need for God to create each kind of animal.

Faith in God to faith in science

These and many other paradigm shifts have marginalised and finally eliminated God. People today have faith in science. The technological achievements brought about by modern science have demonstrated its power to provide answers. Faith is under attack and the Bible is undermined. Even prominent figures in the church argue for evolutionary interpretations of the scriptures. We are ceaselessly bombarded with the "fact" that the universe, the world and all that is in it is the result of purposeless processes. The media and state education are part of the system that has been used by Satan to promote atheistic science to blind people to the fact that God made everything. God no longer serves any purpose and the scientists of today have declared him to be dead. Yet the Bible still speaks today and tells us that
God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.


OLD PARADIGM
NEW PARADIGM
Beliefs
Based on Bible
Blend of New Age & earth-centered religions
Culture
Western individualism
Global solidarity
Values
Based on the Bible
(absolute, unchangable truth)
Based on human idealism
(easy to manipulate)
Morals
Moral boundaries
Sensual freedom
Rights
Personal freedom
Social controls
Economy
Free enterprise
Socialist collective
Government
By the people
By those who control
the masses

A Metaphor for a Worldwide Paradigm Shift
Major World Mind Change as a Paradigm Shift in Our Time. The Process of Paradigm Shift. The Process of Change and the Community Metaphor. Land's S-Curves

Paradigm Shift - Magick, Music, and Media
An online journal of cutting-edge interviews and articles about music, magick, media, hypnosis, NLP, entheogens, consciousness

Thomas Kuhn gave us an interesting and provocative book in his Nature of Scientific Revolutions, in which he described science, under the stimulus of new discoveries, as making a radical change in its philosophy or basic assumptions.
The idea is appealing and it did seem that there were several such shifts, beginning with the Copernican "revolution," in which, supported by the labors of Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it was realized that the earth revolved around the sun and not the contrary.
But as I've elsewhere shown, this was rather the beginning of Western science, the emphasis on experiment and fact as the basis for theory, instead of authority.
However, it was assumed by Kuhn, and we all agreed, that Planck's discovery of the fact that light is radiated in quanta of action all of the same "size," rather than as energy, created a new paradigm. This discovery was the first clue to the true nature of light, previously thought to be waves in an ether. These waves were thought to spread out in all directions and diminish as the square of the distance. The change was revolutionary, and dispensed with the need for a medium (the ether) to carry the waves (much as sound is carried by waves in the air). It introduced quantum physics, and the quantum was found to account for other enigmas.
One especially was that, according to classical physics, the revolving electron should radiate and thus lose energy and fall into the nucleus. Bohr realized that since to radiate it had to do so in quanta, the electron could not radiate unless it changed to an orbit having different angular momentum. (The quantum is a unit of angular momentum; it can have any amount of energy, always associated with a period of time such that the energy multiplied by the time is a constant.)
This contribution of Bohr was accepted by the scientific community to apply to quantum phenomena, but it did not occur to anyone to question the classical view. This I have done recently in my short essay "Confusion in Science," where I can find no basis, theoretical or empirical, for the concept that an accelerating electron radiates energy. Apparently this concept was based on a confusion between accelerating and causing acceleration. Thus the driver of a vehicle says he "accelerates" it -- a figure of speech that is permissible because the driver does cause the acceleration to occur. But it is the engine that accelerates the car, and a scientific account should distinguish controlling acceleration by starting and stopping from acceleration itself. Acceleration is the second derivative; change of accleration is the third derivative, much as acceleration is change of velocity, and science is based on these distinctions. The scientist might say the control by the driver is a human option and outside of science, but the fact that a guided missile not only controls its acceleration but is guided to do so by the moving target makes it imperative that the third derivative be recognized.
So there is no support for the classical view of radiation, and the fact that the quantum of action made this view obsolete was ignored. Instead it was decided that the laws of classical physics and the laws of quantum physics, since they differed in these two domains, required a division of science into classical and quantum.
There was little justification for this split. Now it is true that thermodynamics -- which, since it deals with billions of molecules, each undergoing random motion, has to be predicted by probabilities, whereas each molecule is subject to exact laws -- does justify a distinction. This is not the case with radiation. All radiation, quantum and classical, originates in quanta.
But the fact that the classical view was retained shows that despite quantum physics there was no paradigm shift. This is borne out by other aspects of quantum physics.
(1) One such is that the nature of light was still not understood. The classical view that it was waves in an ether gave light some objectivity. It was the notion of something at least semi-material, and it did not occur to scientists that since the quantum of action, or photon of light, was without rest mass, without charge or other material properties, outside of time (clocks stop at the speed of light), and indifferent to space because a photon from Sirius retained the same energy it has when leaving Sirius, that the quantum had no objective existence.
The complete confirmation of the non-objectivity is that no two persons can see the same photon. Its detection on a photographic plate annihilates the photon, so there is nothing left to predict. Even in the photoelectric effect, in which a part of the photon's energy is annihilated, the part that remains is a new photon with its own complete uncertainty.
But all such was ignored. Science retained its basic credo, that the world is exclusively objective. This again shows that there has been no paradigm shift.
(2) Another piece of evidence that is of special interest because it came before quantum physics was the use in relativity of an event to replace the previous notion of a point. An event occurs in time, so it includes the so-called fourth dimension.

The past and the future are the same -- time is symmetrical; nothing happens. Thus the Civil War could be called an event, and relativity would so treat it. But the Civil War was also a change of state. The nation was not the same after it.

Thus relativity had to ignore history, whereas the quantum of action always produces a change of state. It can cause the atom to become an ion and lead to its forming a chemical compound; it may cause a change in the retina of the eye, producing vision. It is like a small spark which can ignite a forest fire.
Science was so impressed by relativity that it preferred to think of time as similar to space and to ignore the asymmetry implied by change of state. The paradigm shift of quantum theory was ignored. Classical science depended on forces between "billiard balls," whereas quantum physics showed that the quantum has more resemblance to a human decision or a message than to billiard balls bumping into one another.
If the reader experiences a shock that I've again introduced an anthropomorphic or human reference, I cannot withdraw it; it is part of the even larger significance of the paradigm shift that should have occurred with quantum physics.
Before leaving relativity I could also add that the measures that science can correctly say are objective, velocity and position, are set aside by relativity as not significant, emphasis being placed on acceleration, which is considered invariant and therefore important. Another invariant, recognized by Einstein, Bridgeman, and Eddington, but not made use of, is rotation -- a very important part of the paradigm shift that should have occurred, which we will get to later.
(3) I now get to the most difficult part of my thesis. The considerations I've described might be admitted by some readers, but they do not convey the magnitude and significance of the paradigm shift I think is overdue, so I will have to resort to a rather crude example.
Suppose I were to present a plate of food to a child to eat, and the child were to turn the plate upside down, spilling the contents about, and proceed to separate it into different ingredients -- to count the peas, etc. We have been given this marvelous world to experience, but science prefers to analyze it -- a worthy undertaking, but it becomes absurd if the food is not eaten. Analysis may be food for science, but this doesn't mean that the eating of the food should not be included in the theory.
So this is my main thesis. Science describes and analyzes the world, finds out the laws of its behavior, but it never occurs to theoretical science that the law of cause and effect can be applied and used for our own benefit -- communication, transportation, all machines -- using the laws of nature to increase our freedom.
This cannot be dismissed as mere application and anthropomorphic, because all life does the same. Plants control their metabolism to achieve growth and reproduction; animals learn mobility and are able to achieve short-term goals (including some long-term goals such as migration). This is not just technology; it is the basis of life.

©1996 The Estate of Arthur M. Young

Go to Arthur M. Young Page
Go to Essays and Journal Entries


WHAT IS A PARADIGM SHIFT?
day and night pic
SEKRIT PROJKT
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born on July 18, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received a Ph. D. in physics from Harvard University in 1949 and remained there as an assistant professor of general education and history of science. In 1956, Kuhn accepted a post at the University of California--Berkeley, where in 1961 he became a full professor of history of science. In 1964, he was named M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Princeton University. In 1979 he returned to Boston, this time to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as professor of philosophy and history of science. In 1983 he was named Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT.

Of the five books and countless articles he published, Kuhn's most renown work is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which he wrote while a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard. Initially published as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, it was published in book form by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. It has sold some one million copies in 16 languages and is required reading in courses dealing with education, history, psychology, research, and, of course, history and philosophy of science. Structure has also generated a good deal of controversy, and many of Kuhn's ideas have been powerfully challenged (see Weinberg link below).

Throughout thirteen succinct but thought-provoking chapters, Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" [Nicholas Wade, writing for Science], which he described as "the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science." After such revolutions, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another" [Wade].

Although critics chided him for his imprecise use of the term, Kuhn was responsible for popularizing the term paradigm, which he described as essentially a collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set of agreements about how problems are to be understood. According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for "no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism." Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn's argument is that the typical developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, "a scientist's world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory."

Kuhn also maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. Most are, in essence, puzzle-solvers who aim to discover what they already know in advance - "The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly."

During periods of normal science, the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement. As a consequence, scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm. For example, Ptolemy popularized the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and this view was defended for centuries even in the face of conflicting evidence. In the pursuit of science, Kuhn observed, "novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."

And yet, young scientists who are not so deeply indoctrinated into accepted theories - a Newton, Lavoisier, or Einstein - can manage to sweep an old paradigm away. Such scientific revolutions come only after long periods of tradition-bound normal science, for "frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken." However, crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another perspective, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis. This is the "essential tension" in scientific research.

Crises are triggered when scientists acknowledge the discovered counterinstance as an anomaly in fit between the existing theory and nature. All crises are resolved in one of three ways. Normal science can prove capable of handing the crisis-provoking problem, in which case all returns to "normal." Alternatively, the problem resists and is labeled, but it is perceived as resulting from the field's failure to possess the necessary tools with which to solve it, and so scientists set it aside for a future generation with more developed tools. In a few cases, a new candidate for paradigm emerges, and a battle over its acceptance ensues - these are the paradigm wars.

Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution is a noncumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one. But the new paradigm cannot build on the preceding one. Rather, it can only supplant it, for "the normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but actually incommensurable with that which has gone before." Revolutions close with total victory for one of the two opposing camps.

Kuhn also took issue with Karl Popper's view of theory-testing through falsification. According to Kuhn, it is the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that define the puzzles that characterize normal science. If, as Popper suggested, failure to fit were grounds for theory rejection, all theories would be rejected at all times.

In the face of these arguments, how and why does science progress, and what is the nature of its progress? Kuhn argued that normal science progresses because members of a mature scientific community work from a single paradigm or from a closely related set and because different scientific communities seldom investigate the same problems. The result of successful creative work addressing the problems posed by the paradigm is progress. In fact, it is only during periods of normal science that progress seems both obvious and assured. Moreover, "the man who argues that philosophy has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress."

As to whether progress consists in science discovering ultimate truths, Kuhn observed that "we may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth." Instead, the developmental process of science is one of evolution from primitive beginnings through successive stages that are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. Kuhn argued that this is not a process of evolution toward anything, and he questioned whether it really helps to imagine that there is one, full, objective, true account of nature. He likened his conception of the evolution of scientific ideas to Darwin's conception of the evolution of organisms.

The Kuhnian argument that a scientific community is defined by its allegiance to a single paradigm has especially resonated throughout the multiparadigmatic (or preparadigmatic) social sciences, whose community members are often accused of paradigmatic physics envy. Kuhn suggested that questions about whether a discipline is or is not a science can be answered only when members of a scholarly community who doubt their status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments.

Thomas Kuhn was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954 and was awarded the George Sarton Medal in the History of Science in 1982. He held honorary degrees from institutions that included Columbia University and the universities of Notre Dame, Chicago, Padua, and Athens. He suffered from cancer during the last years of his life. Thomas Kuhn died on Monday, June 17, 1996, at the age of 73 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife and three children.


If you would like more, try the following.

* Outline of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
* Synopsis of the Outline [as it appeared in The Philosopher's Magazine].
* Special issue on Kuhn from the journal Configurations.
* The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions, from marxist.org.
* Three scholars speak on Thomas Kuhn and Scientific Revolutions. Requires Real Audio.
* Kuhn at Malaspina University's Science Ring.
* Shifting Science - Kuhn, with a nice embedded glossary.
* A fine summary of Structure by Andreas Ehrencrona.
* A review of Structure by Steven Hodas.
* Review of Structure by Daniel P. Moloney.
* Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms Die Hard, by Imran Javaid for the Harvard Science Review.
* A Tribute to Thomas Kuhn, from @brint.com. Numerous links. Highly recommended.

* Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, developed by Dr. Michael Austin. First-rate. Numerous links.
* The Revolution that Didn't Happen - great reading by Steven Weinberg. Mirror site.
* Has There Ever Been a Paradigm Shift?, by by Arthur M. Young.
* The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research, by Craig Squires.
* On Science, Scientific Method And Evolution Of Scientific Thought, by Dr. Yogesh Malhotra.
* The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions, by Craig Squires.
* Review of Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, by Steve Fuller, Scientific American.
* Thomas Kuhn's Irrationalism, by James Franklin.
* Informative slide show on Scientific Knowledge from the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois.
* A brief biography.
* Scientific Progress, Relativism, and Self-Refutation, by Tim McGrew.
* Obituary from the New York Times.

MFP All rights reserved. You may link to this page for noncommercial, educational purposes, but its contents, in whole or in part, must not be copied or distributed electronically without appropriate citation.

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In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and fathered, defined and popularized the concept of "paradigm shift" (p.10). Kuhn argues that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions", and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another".

Think of a Paradigm Shift as a change from one way of thinking to another. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change.

For example, agriculture changed early primitive society. The primitive Indians existed for centuries roaming the earth constantly hunting and gathering for seasonal foods and water. However, by 2000 B.C., Middle America was a landscape of very small villages, each surrounded by patchy fields of corn and other vegetables.

Agents of change helped create a paradigm-shift moving scientific theory from the Plolemaic system (the earth at the center of the universe) to the Copernican system (the sun at the center of the universe), and moving from Newtonian physics to Relativity and Quantum Physics. Both movements eventually changed the world view. These transformations were gradual as old beliefs were replaced by the new paradigms creating "a new gestalt" (p. 112).

Likewise, the printing press, the making of books and the use of vernacular language inevitable changed the culture of a people and had a direct affect on the scientific revolution. Johann Gutenberg's invention in the 1440's of movable type was an agent of change. Books became readily available, smaller and easier to handle and cheap to purchase. Masses of people acquired direct access to the scriputures. Attitudes began to change as people were relieved from church domination.

Similarly, agents of change are driving a new paradigm shift today. The signs are all around us. For example, the introduction of the personal computer and the internet have impacted both personal and business environments, and is a catalyst for a Paradigm Shift. We are shifting from a mechanistic, manufacturing, industrial society to an organic, service based, information centered society, and increases in technology will continue to impact globally. Change is inevitable. It's the only true constant.

In conclusion, for millions of years we have been evolving and will continue to do so. Change is difficult. Human Beings resist change; however, the process has been set in motion long ago and we will continue to co-create our own experience. Kuhn states that "awareness is prerequisite to all acceptable changes of theory" (p. 67). It all begins in the mind of the person. What we perceive, whether normal or metanormal, conscious or unconscious, are subject to the limitations and distortions produced by our inherited and socially conditional nature. However, we are not restricted by this for we can change. We are moving at an accelerated rate of speed and our state of consciousness is transforming and transcending. Many are awakening as our conscious awareness expands.

Reference: Kuhn, Thomas, S., "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Second Edition, Enlarged, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970(1962)

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HAVING A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
WE ARE SPIRITUAL BEINGS
HAVING A HUMAN EXPERIENCE
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In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published a groundbreaking book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In it, he argued that the progress of science is not gradual but (much as we now think of biological evolution), a kind of punctuated equilibrium, with moments of epochal change. When Copernicus explained the movements of the planets by postulating that they moved around the sun rather than the earth, or when Darwin introduced his ideas about the origin of species, they were doing more than just building on past discoveries, or explaining new experimental data. A truly profound scientific breakthrough, Kuhn notes, "is seldom or never just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight."[1]

Kuhn referred to these revolutionary processes in science as "paradigm shifts", a term that has now entered the language to describe any profound change in our frame of reference.

Paradigm shifts occur from time to time in business as well as in science. And as with scientific revolutions, they are often hard fought, and the ideas underlying them not widely accepted until long after they were first introduced. What's more, they often have implications that go far beyond the insights of their creators.

One such paradigm shift occurred with the introduction of the standardized architecture of the IBM personal computer in 1981. In a huge departure from previous industry practice, IBM chose to build its computer from off the shelf components, and to open up its design for cloning by other manufacturers. As a result, the IBM personal computer architecture became the standard, over time displacing not only other personal computer designs, but over the next two decades, minicomputers and mainframes.

However, the executives at IBM failed to understand the full consequences of their decision. At the time, IBM's market share in computers far exceeded Microsoft's dominance of the desktop operating system market today. Software was a small part of the computer industry, a necessary part of an integrated computer, often bundled rather than sold separately. What independent software companies did exist were clearly satellite to their chosen hardware platform. So when it came time to provide an operating system for the new machine, IBM decided to license it from a small company called Microsoft, giving away the right to resell the software to the small part of the market that IBM did not control. As cloned personal computers were built by thousands of manufacturers large and small, IBM lost its leadership in the new market. Software became the new sun that the industry revolved around; Microsoft, not IBM, became the most important company in the computer industry.

But that's not the only lesson from this story. In the initial competition for leadership of the personal computer market, companies vied to "enhance" the personal computer standard, adding support for new peripherals, faster buses, and other proprietary technical innovations. Their executives, trained in the previous, hardware-dominated computer industry, acted on the lessons of the old paradigm.

The most intransigent, such as Digital's Ken Olson, derided the PC as a toy, and refused to enter the market until too late. But even pioneers like Compaq, whose initial success was driven by the introduction of "luggable" computers, the ancestor of today's laptop, were ultimately misled by old lessons that no longer applied in the new paradigm. It took an outsider, Michael Dell, who began his company selling mail order PCs from a college dorm room, to realize that a standardized PC was a commodity, and that marketplace advantage came not from building a better PC, but from building one that was good enough, lowering the cost of production by embracing standards, and seeking advantage in areas such as marketing, distribution, and logistics. In the end, it was Dell, not IBM or Compaq, who became the largest PC hardware vendor.

Meanwhile, Intel, another company that made a bold bet on the new commodity platform, abandoned its memory chip business as indefensible and made a commitment to be the more complex brains of the new design. The fact that most of the PCs built today bear an "Intel Inside" logo reminds us of the fact that even within a commodity architecture, there are opportunities for proprietary advantage.

What does all this have to do with open source software, you might ask?

My premise is that free and open source developers are in much the same position today that IBM was in 1981 when it changed the rules of the computer industry, but failed to understand the consequences of the change, allowing others to reap the benefits. Most existing proprietary software vendors are no better off, playing by the old rules while the new rules are reshaping the industry around them.

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.

It is in studying these next-generation applications that we can begin to understand the true long-term significance of the open source paradigm shift.

If open source pioneers are to benefit from the revolution we've unleashed, we must look through the foreground elements of the free and open source movements, and understand more deeply both the causes and consequences of the revolution.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil once said, "I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started."[2]

I find it useful to see open source as an expression of three deep, long-term trends:

* The commoditization of software
* Network-enabled collaboration
* Software customizability (software as a service)

Long term trends like these "three Cs", rather than the Free Software Manifesto or The Open Source Definition, should be the lens through which we understand the changes that are being unleashed..