Microsoft made a stunning announcement during today’s Professional Developers Conference: a lightweight Web-based version of Office. Earlier in the day, Microsoft debuted Windows 7. Windows 7’s core feature focus is making content more easily accessible across devices, PCs or services.
Technology publisher and Web 2.0 impresario Tim O’Reilly wrote a thought-provoking post today about the dynamics of the nascent cloud computing business. He makes some important and valid points, but his analysis is also flawed, and the flaws of his argument are as revealing as its strengths.
As the world financial crisis has gotten gradually worse over the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering what this means for the Web. … we’re clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed.
Web 2.0 has annoyed legions of information technology professionals by providing an experience for consumers that, in many ways, is just plain better than what everyone gets at work
The break-up of behemoth vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970s, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980s, and accelerated in the 1990s with globalization.
YouTube may make a lousy place to hold a class, but that doesn’t mean that the YouTube experience isn’t shaping the expectations of students, especially those engaged in online learning.
I’m going to remove the names of the two Web 2.0 start-ups that apparently have just merged, according to a recent blog post from Jeff Nolan. I don’t really care about the merger at all or either of the two companies. I’m merely posting a short excerpt from the press release announcing the merger with the names redacted (they don’t deserve more publicity with a press release like this), because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a paragraph filled with so many Web 2.0 buzzwords that says absolutely nothing.
If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.
Live Mesh is so messy to explain, I can’t cover everything in this post. But simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft’s attempt to turn operating-system and proprietary-services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It’s the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It’s bold, brilliant and downright scary.
The number of students enrolling in computer-science programs dropped when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. You might expect enrollment to shoot back up now that the Web 2.0 renaissance is minting a new round of techie millionaires.
You’d be wrong: The number of students receiving undergraduate computer-science degrees is the lowest it’s been for the last 10 years, according to the Computing Research Association. (It could be longer; that’s as far back as the data released by the CRA goes.)
Maybe two years ago, I hosted a panel discussion on the emerging Web 2.0 economy, and I asked my panelists if we were in a bubble. Because it’s clear to me that we are. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. This is how technology evolves: like life itself, in blooms and crashes. And I think we should all acknowledge where we are in the cycle. Anyway, one of my panelists, SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier, was adamant that this was no bubble. Now Mr. Not-a-Bubble is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if it’s in the $300,000-a-month range–a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card-funded Amazon S3 account would kill for–is “noise” that distracts them from their potential.
In a move that many said signaled the official death of the page view, Nielsen/NetRatings last July announced that it would no longer use page views as the primary metric for comparing Web sites. At the time, the Internet benchmarking firm cited the growing popularity of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or AJAX–which can refresh content without completely reloading a Web page–as the main reason for the change to measuring time spent on a site.
Eight months later, Nielsen now says that it overestimated the impact of AJAX on page-view metrics. Nielsen found that instead, online video is the key reason for the growing irrelevance of page views.
I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that start-ups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just relaunched with a new format and features, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.
According to Forrester Research, there will be “strong demand” for Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise in 2008. Even though 42% of enterprises say adding Web 2.0 tools is not on their agenda, according to a Q3 2007 survey, Forrester expects that half of those will change their mind and embrace Web 2.0 tools by [...]
In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it’s almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It’s easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late ’90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early ’90s. The weird and woolly history of the Web can best be traced through some of its most generic domains. Here’s a sampling that trace the arc from the geeks to the entrepreneurs and into a more staid corporate world.
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