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 asthey
have commenced the transition from"content only" web
siteto 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 thatimplement 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 competitvechallenges that a Web 2.0landscape
will present.