Incrementalism and "The New New Thing"
By Jeff Nolan, NewsGator
(Continued)
The Trouble with Web 2.0
All this investment is creating a problem. In my opinion, the worst thing that happened in these last couple of years is that damn versioning of what is a simply the broader continuum of the evolving Web. Define Web 2.0... just try it and you will see the futility.
What is coming to a close is the notion that all online services need to be free and paid for with advertising; there are too many startups that are dependent on a business model that has yet to prove itself for tech companies.
VCs will still fund these deals and Valley pundits will gleefully predict the next Twitter, but the fact remains that most startups simply die, some get acquired for nothing, and the rare few go on to great success. No difference here, Move on people... there's nothing to see here.
What's frightening is the inability to answer the basic question "What's next?" The Valley thrives on "The New New Thing" (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation, there is an awkward moment where we're just figuring out where we've been but have yet to see where we are going... Right now is that moment.
Despite the recriminations about the term "Web 2.0,″ the fact is that it has come to symbolize a set of characteristics and expectations about service-based computing. It's also come to refer to the blurring of the line between consumer and business applications, with much of the energy around new business apps being driven by a consumer - or maybe better said "individual" - path to adoption. But these attributes are now part of the ordinary fabric that all companies attempt to embrace.
So What's Next?
I am waiting for venture investors to once again discover that there is money to be made in enterprise software. Bryan Stolle, Agile Software founder currently with Mohr Davidow, says software investing is the new black and solving business problems is where it's at. Somewhat confusingly, he then goes on to list trends that have little to do with business processes, like SaaS as an appliance and new development environments in the cloud.
He broke no new ground and even though I have a lot of respect for Bryan, his op-ed did nothing to convince me that enterprise software investing is on the verge of a renaissance. Enterprise software suffers from a self-inflicted wound: an inherently unscalable sales model (if you aren't one of the big bracket companies.)
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