It has always been about context

Phil Wainewright on the crucial pieces of Internet computing -

much of the data will be floating about for free, and the really important question is not going to be the data itself but how you view it. In short: Who will own the context? Jon is right to end up by highlighting vantage points, because owning data won't get you very far unless you can put it in a context that adds value. Doing exactly that of course is what has already made Google so much money

In my previous post I echoed Tim O'Reilly's point about the importance of data in future computing platforms. Data provides critical stickiness to the context, Traditionally users had access to context in one form or the other - either in a closed computing platforms (enterprise architectures) or publicly accessible computing architectures such as Yahoo and Google. What is dramatically changing this context is the data and analysis of that data (read semantic) provided by the network-centric computing platform. This emphasis on data and context managed around data will make next generation application architecture very compelling.