The Spy vs. Spy Follow Up File

David Berlind and other opinion leaders like Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr -- recently and around the time of the conference -- have been talking about Web 2.0 as well as all the alliances between IT and Internet companies.

Berlind's list falls out like this: the Black Hats [my designation] are Microsoft, Yahoo! & Real (they're all "black" because they choose to associate with that bad company, Microsoft); the White Hats are Google, Sun, AOL & Comcast (they're "white" because they represent the forces of good aligning against that bad company, Microsoft).

Now, Gary Edwards (OASIS OpenDocument TC member) in conversation the other night had an interesting supposition to the effect of, 'Where are Intel and AMD on these lists?' It's a rhetorical question because everyone in the IT trade knows that Intel is Black (it is the other half of Wintel, as in "Windows-Intel hegemony") and AMD is White (by dint of being a counterveiling force to Intel and through partnership with Sun...on some really rather nice servers & workstations).

So it's quite simple to extend the lists to include the chipmakers. But the really interesting question -- also Gary's -- then becomes, 'Where the heck is IBM (and the PowerChip)?' And that begs the question, 'Where is Apple, ferthatmatter?'

What I learned doing startups in the dotcom era: it's not about the answers, it's about the questions.