I was on the O’Reilly Radar home and clicked over to the Web 2.0 page: http://radar.oreilly.com/web2/. At the very top is an interesting and refreshing definition of Web 2.0:
“…..Web 2.0 is a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterized by harnessing collective intelligence, openness, and network effects.”
I really like that. Web 2.0 is not about technology or AJAX or video sharing or blogs. It’s about:
a) collective intelligence;
b) openness (which I think goes hand-in-hand with collective intelligence); and
c) network effects (a wide, easily available, easily accessible and open network makes the collectivness and openness possible).
If you haven’t heard already - Microsoft has made a major leap forward towards open source. See this article from O’Reilly Radar.
I am not sure if the right words are “leap forward towards open source”. I think it is more of an acceptance of open source. There are far too many applications, OS, products on open source. From a pure ecnonomics MS is never going to be able to compete with the price point that open source provides - free or near free. And no matter what, the legions of open source programmers are not going away.
I am a very happy open source user. While I haven’t donated money back to any open source projects (when I went to give OpenOffice some money they would accept only PayPal), I have become a huge proponent of open source and am regularly recommending it to my customers (if it meets their needs).
I am not sure what to make of the approach MS is taking with open source. You can read more about it on their new open source site. They are touting VS Studio Express edition and MS SQL Server Express editions. Which is great that those products are free and available to everyone, but the real power of open source is that the source code is available freely too (under GPL or some other open source license).
My prediction - over the coming years, most if not all the software applications will be a) hosted (which means annual subscription); and b) be available as a free basic version, along with two or three paid versions, each stair stepping the prices higher.
There was a great article posted by B2B that does an outstanding job of discussing Web 2.0 and I wanted to share it here. If you have time check it out - its a very good article.
I received this article in my InBox today. It’s a good article about how Web 2.0 is now more mainstream. Towards the end Tim O’Reilly also talks about the “Web 2.0 attitude”.
I was on alexa.com a couple of days ago and again today. Today digg.com is ranked #77 in terms of traffic (on a related note, since digg.com is advertisement driven I wonder how much advertisement dollars that means for them!). NYTimes.com is ranked 119. So digg.com is many many spots ahead of nytimes.com. Interesting.
Does that mean more people go to digg.com than to New York Times’ website to get news & information?
The topic of Web 2.0 came up at work the other day . Luke and Jen, a couple of fine folks I work with, wondered what it really meant. They are really smart folks, are very tech-savvy and I respect them a lot; they are not developers. I explained them Web 2.0 by contrasting it with Web 1.0:
With Web 1.0, everyone published content on the web. With Web 2.0 everyone collaborates on the content, and more importantly, decides which content is good and which should be buried.
It’s great that Web 2.0 is all around us and is used by millions of consumers on the Internet. (Note - I said consumers and not users since I believe that we are now really consumers in this huge marketing channel called the World Wide Web; more on that in a future post). But how does Web 2.0 impact the business world? How do business take advantage of Web 2.0; or the question even before that is how does Web 2.0 apply to the business world?
I found a very good post about this on WebDiva’s blog. In it she talks about how business can adopt Web 2.0. In particular she uses a term “community-based buisness”.
I believe that is the biggest change that Web 2.0 brings about for businesses. Customers, vendors, suppliers are no longer outside entities for a business. Businesses have to accept the paradigm shift that everyone now expects direct and frequent communication with the responsible person at the business for the specific issue or item they have. For example, customers expect to talk to Product Managers directly without having to deal with an Account Manager as the go-between. Suppliers will want to talk to the engineer for his/her specific technical requirements without dealing with a procurement department. Prospective employees want to hear from current employees directly and not the HR dog-n-pony show.
All of this is happening because Web 2.0 is essentially the democratization of the Internet. To adopt Web 2.0, businesses should consider doing the following:
1. Allow a technical writer to write the first draft of the product manual. But make the manual a wiki. Then allow Customer Support and customers themselves to edit and update the product manual; as users they know the product better than anyone else. The tech writer simply becomes an administrator of the manual at that point, validating the changes made to the manual and making sure the manual is well formatted and accurate.
2. My experience has been that a bad hire is far worse than an open position. Allow employees to blog openly. Yes, some of them may say things that Marketing or Management don’t want said. But put control and compliance in place for that. Prospective employees will read the blogs and have real insight in to their prospective employer and their prospective job.
3. Provide APIs for your product. Your product will be extended in ways you never imagined. Suddenly your product will have “features” it never had before; you will be able to reach new customers and drive revenue.
4. Let the voice of many dictate your product roadmap. Allow for Digg style voting of ideas, product features, or even company picnic locations! You will be able to build what a majority of your customers want, not just what the highest paying customer of the month wants.
