• The author has been a fan of Stewart Brand's "Pace Layering" for decades.
• It's a great framework for understanding how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact.
• The author thought about a tech version for over a year and finally created a rough draft during the holiday break.
• Product includes devices like XBox, TiVo, PalmPilot; apps like Firefox, MS Office, Lotus 1-2-3; and services like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia.
• Components include libraries and frameworks like glibc, LLVM, Django, React, Docker, Arduino etc.
• Organizations involve human governance in forms like companies (Bell Labs, IBM, Microsoft, ARM), non-profits (ICANN, FSF, Linux and Apache foundations), and standards bodies (IETF, W3C, ECMA, OASIS).
• Standards are open via standards bodies, proprietary to individual companies, or de facto, with examples including networking protocols, file formats, character encodings, operating system interfaces, and hardware languages.
• Computer science and electrical engineering are the academic fields providing direct foundations for software and hardware respectively, with math and physics beneath them.
• The author is not the first to think this way, with Erik Samsoe on Twitter (with Brand), Dmitri Glazkov's "Forces of the pace layering confusion", and Gartner's Pace-layered Application Strategy. Also, the classic 7-layer ISO network model and 4-layer IETF model are forms of pace layering applied to networking protocols.