Web 2.0 anyone ?
7 March 2006 | Published in Internet, Real life | 2 Comments
It is not often I agree with John C. Dvorak, but his column in PC Magazine this week is worth reading.
The highly trumpeted concept of Web 2.0 is a marketing mantra designed to convince you to invest in new software acquisitions. The truth is that the Internet is changing in favour of a model where the users are in charge. The blog crazyness is a good example of a world where the content providers are no more big corporations, but also individuals. You can blog for free on services like Blogger. If you want to have more control, you can run you own blogging software. The best of them are open-sourced, ie free to deploy. Best of all, they are simple enough to use, even for Joe Blow’s grandmother.
The trouble with free software of course is that no-one is paying to use it. A nightmarish perspective for several companies which build their wealthiness on the fact that you are paying a lot to run their bloated software, incompatible with their competitors offerings. So, they have to find a way to milk the cow again.
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11 March 2006 at 23:01 (#)
I wonder what you are actually talking about.
As far as I see the whole situation, Web 2 isn’t about buying new software. Nor is it about shifting the weight of information delivery to the actual consumers. Blogging and Web 2 hasn’t to do anything with each other.
Web 2 is nothing but a name forged back in 2004 describing the use of new technologies (as for instance AJAX) to deliver a new set of features. It might also refer to the Semantic Web – as one of the key sets of the Semantic Web, syndication started back in 1997 is a part of Web 2 as well.
Sure, blogs use syndication a lot. Otherwise it would be somewhat hard to control the flow of information for the consumer. However, the list of buzzwords in this context far outweighs the actual situation.
Concerning your point that nobody pays for free software, and that this situation is somewhat hard to come by for diverse software companies I have to reply the following.
First off, there has always been some kind of evolution. If software companies (or for instance the music industry) cannot come up with a business model which allows them to make profits without criminalising their customers, trampling over our civil liberties or installing malware on our computers then they do not deserve to stay in business, and new ways for artists to reach the public will have to emerge. Quoting Bill Thompson here.
Now, there is nothing wrong with this. At least not as far as I can tell. With the emerging of a new kind of software – in this case Open Source software, the companies have to adopt a new strategy. Hailing consumerism as in the past just isn’t the solution anymore. A product as such isn’t worth that much money anymore. The service offered when you purchase a product is starting to get more and more important.
Interestingly, it’s the companies offering open source products and solutions who seem to have adopted this behavior the first. Take Red Hat for instance. Or whatever other Linux distribution you like – that is actually an organization with the idea to make some monetary benefit.
Those companies do charge for their product. Of course you can still run a Debian installation. Or Gentoo. Or any other distribution you want and relay on the community. But big companies who want to relay on what they have are willing to pay for their support.
Not paying for software isn’t the issue. The issue is that the big companies, be it Microsoft, Apple and the like are led in a too conservative way to jump on the train while it is still rolling slowly out the station. It’s now that they got to act. Apple might have done a first step when they started to use Mac OS X with it’s FreeBSD layers. Microsoft seems not to have understood anything as of now. Yet again I might say.
What happens when a company of that size misses the right opportunity can be seen with the (slightly arbitrary, I admit) example of the Internet Explorer.
Anyhow.
11 March 2006 at 23:17 (#)
all i can say is that…dvorak is a joke…
i won’t disagree with either one of you, but until we reach an agreement on what ‘web 2.0′ is, i dont think anything either side says really works. sure, given a few examples we can illustrate what web 2.0 is, but at most it’s a combination of both emerging technologies and users.