Web 2.0: The big time
: We’re out of the intimate workshops and into the big room with the big names. John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly are kicking it off with their view of the web as the new operating system with an internet application stack.
Hell, the web is the new operating system of life, no?
They say that profit is migrating down to data suppliers and up to companies that can take advantage of network effects.
They like the architecture of participation with companies that grow as your customers build your business for you: Google, Flikr, eBay, Amazon, Blogger, Linux, Apache.
O’Reilly says Amazon is amazing because it overlayed network effect on an old, only OK business.
Yes, the advantage of this is that the people bring you (a) content but also (b) marketing and (c) valuable data.
“Data is the Intel Inside,” says the slide. O’Reilly says Microsoft won the browser war but couldn’t turn that into money; it gained them no leverage.
Next: “Innovation in assembly.” (Don’t you just hate overly abstracted PowerPoint headlines? Hey, in the news business we learned that headlines must inform.) O’Reilly explains as an example his new company that allows users to deconstruct and reconstruct text books.
“Lightweight business models” is the nirvanna of today, the cure for the ’90s.
O’Reilly says we come to the end of the software upgrade cycle. So innovations are introduced a small bit at a time instead of a ton at a time. Amazon, eBay, Google add innovations that way; Microsoft takes a half-a-decade to come up with a new OS.
Software “above the level of a single device” is another trend they see…. e.g., the iPod.
Next they emphasize the “power of the tail.” See Chris Anderson’s story in Wired, which just went up online today.
Those are the themes of the confab, they say.
