Critical thinking post by Marc Andreessen. I linked to this on Sunday’s Morning Coffee and have been contemplating it ever since.

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.

Building is obviously the crux of the entire piece and does focus on political dynamics, but the most important statement is about WILL.

The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.

To tie it to topics more close to home, open source, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, we need to apply the desire to create over project politics and personalities. Just to be clear I’m not referencing any specific people or projects but I know that if we focus on over building, on over creating, the biggest problem will be what great things can we incorporate into platforms rather then who will solve some demand that may not even exist.

It’s great that platforms have robust ecosystems to fill in those gaps and expand functionality but without core creation and welcoming environments to test limits, progress won’t occur. Let’s see some more private-public partnerships. Let’s get hosts and SaaS to commit code back. Let’s build!