Nicholas Carr has an interesting idea:
I’d like Apple and Microsoft to build into their OSes a universal “Make Widget” command. So you right click on a spreadsheet or a chart or a movie or a slide show or a presentation (or whatever), choose “Make Widget” from the contextual menu, and a widget is automatically created and uploaded to a web server (owned by Apple or Microsoft), and you’re given a simple URL to paste into your blog or site.
In one fell swoop, the OS giants would make the publishing of content and mini-applications butt-simple while also disintermediating go-betweens like YouTube and Google. I don’t know how the economics would work – you’d have to charge for storage above a certain level, I guess, or incorporate some kind of advertising – but I’m sure they could figure out something. And the competitive benefits would be substantial.
