Fantastic interview. Here's a killer quote:

So when I started seeing comments by Ballmer saying Open Source is an intellectual property destroyer and it’s taking all the profits out of the system, I thought this is just what had happened before. We’re seeing the commoditization of software where the value is going out of many classes of software that people used to pay for. But it’s being rediscovered and moving up the stack and it’s moving down the stack. That led me to the couple of new ideas that we now call Web 2.0: the Internet as a platform, information businesses using software as a service, harnessing collective intelligence – that’s moving up the stack. Down the stack is what I call “Data as the Intel Inside.” This stack model is repeating itself as this economic model is repeating itself, and so I think that each time you see something becoming free, something else is becoming expensive, which goes back to the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits.

The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits is a Clayton Christensen idea and is at the heart of disruptive innovation.When something gets commoditized, the profits don't just disappear; rather, the value chain gets restructured, and the profits move somewhere else. Example: mp3 technology has made music replication essentially free, thus eliminating much of the revenue from music sales -- but allowing it to re-emerge in concert ticket sales and merchandise. Open source is disruptive in much the same way; it commoditizes software, but opens up revenue opportunities by allowing value to flow to service providers.

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