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November 15, 2006
Bust 3.0
Bust 3.0: Kevin Maney writes a jaundiced review of Web 2.0 Summit in USA Today. For me, the key insight in this piece was that much of the activity -- the driving goal -- is to sell a company to Google or similar group. Development that is tuned so heavily towards private benefit seems a key marker of an unsustainable situation. The first digital bust occurred towards 1995, when CD-ROM achieved enough distribution to form a market, but where distribution was still locked to limited retail shelfspace. Towards 2000 we had better distribution with the WWW, but there was a bust when business plans outpaced real audience size, regular audience involvement, and mature client/server technologies. Now the focus is on flipping to Google, a musical chairs game... Jason Calcanis points out that advertising shows signs of real strength, but that doesn't mean that all advertisers will survive, much less continue a buying binge. Where's Adobe in this? In 1995, Macromedia was hurt pretty badly when the CD-ROM bubble burst -- Director did maybe 80% of company revenue in those days. In 2000 Dreamweaver was the biggest single contributor to revenue, and the company stalled when businesses held off on webtool purchases. Adobe these days has a much wider base of support, across more customer groups... the RIA and video angles have high growth prospects, but there are more eggs, more baskets these days than what I saw at Macromedia during the prior two retrenchments. Anyway, Kevin's pretty funny, describing what he saw... there's important work we can deliver with this new technology, so it's eventually necessary to clear some of the fantasy-based stuff out of the way.... :(
Posted by JohnDowdell at November 15, 2006 01:50 PM
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