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26 March 2007
Roll those sleeves up, and get on with the Web 2.0 hard slog
Posted by Paul Miller at March 26, 2007 09:49 AM
Crosslink Capital's Peter Rip is one of those tech-aware money men with an often insightful take on the sector in which we operate, shared through his EarlyStage VC blog. It's one of a small group of sites offering up the snippets that tend to form the basis of the 'fyi' posts that fly around inside Talis from time to time.
Peter's post from 19 March, detail aside [the graphs were later supplemented by a post on 21 March], offered a concise expression of something I've more-or-less been saying to presentation audiences since last Autumn/Fall (or Spring, if you're in the southern hemisphere!), so it's nice to see his interpretation bearing out the instincts of myself and my colleagues;
“Much of the 'easy' innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap - thanks to open source, simple - thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive - thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising.
Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today.
The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.”
Isn't it lucky, then, that this is exactly the space in which we are active? :-)
Technorati Tags: Platforms, crosslink capital, Talis, Talis Platform, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
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