In a way some opinions in this thread (Reality TV Drama About Game Development?) inspired this blog post, even though I have been thinking about the topic for a while. What part of following a huge team working on a huge project can possibly be "boring"?
I know I am kinda guilty of that myself ... but it pains me more and more to see how much people are into competition, how they want to be smarter than everybody else and stick to their way of doing things.

After reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People my way of thinking about projects, standards and collaboration changed a lot.
Interdependence (with independence as an option to fall back on) is a step forward from independence - you only compromise if you are not going for proper win-win situations. Doing what is important is better than doing what is urgent because less and less urgent tasks will come up ... things like that. Standards don't have to lead to uniformity ... they can make diversity manageable if designed and used properly.
Still people love isolation and value their independence. Why? Probably because everybody still sucks at collaboration.
Shouldn't we get better at it?

The book Abundance really adds to my frustration with the way things are going now. It outlines how linear thinking is a problem in times with exponential technology ... but it totally makes a case for "competition over collaboration" which is really stupid if you ask me.

P2P efforts, Creative Commons, Web Standards, Open Source, Crowdsourcing all seem like nice steps in the right direction, but they are just pieces of the puzzle. Also, the mindset within those movements is still too much a product of the free market economy paradigm.

I think I might write a book (Damn The Isolation Age) about my vision of what a collaboration age could look like and why I think our current paradigms are not future proof at all.
I want a seamless software experience. I hate the small app trend ...