Even though Bill Gates has been slowly backing out of Microsoft for the last five years, his actual July 1 departure from the company is a milestone worth reflecting on. What is his single most important legacy? The ability, through monopolistic business practices, to make Microsoft’s products global, de facto standards for business and consumers.
Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: “Steve, what’s the next hot online community?” It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.
Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming “like air.”
The instant-analysis business is a tricky one. None of us have working crystal balls; any attempt to predict the future, even the five-minutes-from-now future, is risky. For example, on Jan. 31, mere hours before Microsoft made its unsolicited $44 billion-plus offer for Yahoo, Forrester Research, my alma matter, posted a research note with the following headline and deck:
Microsoft Will Make Small Acquisitions
Its Size, Visibility To Antitrust Bodies And Strategy Rule Out Big Deals
The DataPortability Workgroup announced Tuesday that Google, Plaxo–and the big surprise–Facebook will be participating in discussions on how users can “access their friends and media across all the applications, social-networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.” This couldn’t have come at a more perfect time, especially given the flap over Robert Scoble scraping Facebook.
All content for Voices is selected by, and/or solicited by, the editors of All Things Digital. We do not publish unsolicited or over-the-transom submissions.
Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.
