I put this piece together in response to another stimulating post by Dare Obasanjo titled "Is Google the Next Microsoft or the Next Netscape?". I changed the title of this post to project the fact that Web 2.0 provides the appropriate context (IMHO) for Dare's point re. "Web Site Stickiness".
Stickiness is a defining characteristic of Web 1.0 . It's all about eyeballs (site visitors) which implied ultimately that all early Web business models ended up down the advertising route.
I always felt that Web 1.0 was akin to having a crowd of people at your reception area seeking a look at your corporate brochures, and then someone realizes that you could start selling AD space in these brochures in response to the growing crowd size and frequency of congregation. The long-term folly of this approach is now obvious, as many organizations forgot their core value propositions (expressed via product offerings) in the process and wandered blindly down the AD model cul-de-sac, and we all know what happened down there..
Web 2.0 is taking shape (the inflection is in its latter stages), and the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 are:
- Fabric of Executable Endpoints
- Semantic Content (the RSS/RDF/Atom/FOAF semantic crumbs emerging from the Blogosphere are great examples of things to come re. XQuery queries over HTTP for instance) Migration from the Web Site (defined by static or dynamic HTML page generation) concept, to that of a "Web Point of Presence" (I don't know if this term will catch on, but the conceptual essence here is factual) that enables an organization to achieve the following:
- Package/catalog value proposition (product and services) using RSS/RDF/Atom
- Provide SOAP compliant Executable Endpoints (Web Services) for consuming value proposition (as opposed to being distracted by the AD model)
- Provide Web Services for consummating contracts associated with core value proposition Identification of internal efficiencies, new products/services that leverage Semantic Content and Web Services, and tangibly exploit:
- Composite Web Services construction from legacy monolithic application pools
- Standards based (e.g. BPEL) orchestration and integration of disparate composite services (across the Fabric referred to above)
When you factor in all of the above, the real question is whether Google and others are equipped to exploit Web 2.0? To some degree, is the best answer at the current time as they have commenced the transition from "content only" web site to web platform (via the many Web Services initiatives that expose SOAP and REST interfaces to various services), but there is much more to this journey, and that's the devil in the "competitive landscape details".
From my obviously biased perspective, I think Virtuoso and Yukon+WinFS provide the server models for driving Web 2.0 points of presence (single server instances that implement multiple protocols). Thus, if Google, Yahoo! et al. aren't exploiting these or similar products, then they will be vulnerable over the long term to the competitve challenges that a Web 2.0 landscape will present.
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