Check out this quote from the April 9th cover story in BUSINESSWEEK about Google:
Box Heading: "Where Google May be Headed"
Caption Title: "A Living Machine"
Caption: “…Google could morph into something out of the dystopian darkness of THE TERMINATOR. Does the Google grid, once it comprises millions of machines analyzing the whole of human existence, at some point become sentient - for all appearances, a thinking machine?”
Surely this type of fantasy sensationalism belongs in WIRED, but BUSINESSWEEK? We are definitely in SOME kind of a bubble.
I jumped ship from a small upstart to a more stable company just before the 1.0 bubble burst. I’ve recently jumped again. The writing is on the wall.
The next decline will have nothing to do with Web 2.0 though. It will be about something more fundamental:
‘Do we need this much IT to run our company?’.
The big companies will begin to cut down on their IT spending as they understand they run just as well at 50% the IT cost.
Many consultants will loose their contracts and the hourly wages will start to decline. That means IT wages in general will follow down shortly.
Large application servers, big business systems, complicated frameworks and models for development, they will all feel this one. No one will want to pay people for setting up SAP, configuring websphere, etc.
IT as a field will move from complexity to simplicity, and that will be the REAL backlash. If you aren’t AGILE and using PRODUCTIVE tools for development, you may find yourself in a rough spot.
Its coming. Give or take 1-2 years in the US, and 2-3 for Europe to catch up.
"what will you do differently in this bubble?"
from different perspective those two bubbles are one the same bubble. but that’s another bubble all toegether.
difference is that now we have means, infrastructure and knowledge to use, to hook up to growing sphere, so it won’t end up being bubble burst. problem with bubble is that outside area is always greater then its nucleus.
Lots of interesting points here. The Web is here to stay and it’s to everyone’s benefit to make it benefit everyone especially to help the poor and marginalised. So if we see it not just from a greedy grab perspective but as something that can really increase the quality of life out there then we can also say the Web 2.0 can be for the good. But at the same time we must be aware of the way say YouTube is used to humiliate school-teachers and to re-inforce acts of gang-violence(as with guns (swords!) the quote from Homer’s Odyssey is relevant: Bare steel in sight draws men to fight(the Web has enhanced for better or worse aspects of human nature). Web 2.0 is different. When K1 then known as Filmbaker set up the London Photo Document 1999 the project collapsed as no-one had digital cameras and as has been pointed out modems were purgatorialy slow. It’s different now. The bubble may burst but this time it will be spectacular and unlike the last time it will be all over the web!
GRANDPA lived through the Depression, and life thereafter was indelibly shaped by haunting memories of soup kitchens and hobos. Similarly, the digerati of Silicon Valley endured the 1990s dot-com bubble, and since then have lived with the psychic shock of its ignoble end.
The average valley entrepreneur tends to spot bubbles everywhere, much the way granddad feared financial ruin every time a grandchild carelessly scraped leftover food into the trash.
This is the start of a very small bubble. The world learned from the late 90’s what can happen if things get too out of control. The one good thing that the dotcom bubble proved was that only the strong survive (ie microsoft, cisco, oracle, etc). These companies will be a huge part of the current bubble. However, looking back at 10 years ago, you will not see as many smaller players get into the game. It will be hard for them to reinvent what has already been perfected (somewhat) and try to survive it. That is what happened in the late 90’s and many got burned.
This bubble is going hand in hand with the global Real Estate bubble. However, this time programmers in Bangalore will be lucky to sell bananas on the street, while we will sit here in our Million dollar condos buying $9/gal milk and $6/gal gas on unemployment checks.
We’d sure have some sweet stories to share with our grandkids.
Well, we’ve got some issues. This time it isn’t a bubble, it’s a scum blister. There will be casualties.
In 2000 the web’s value was full of air, there was no substance. Sure, the internet is the future of literacy, the future of money, and the future of manufacturing and trade. It’ll all happen online.
The problem is that a lot of the companies today are full of spam, full of trolls, full of spam, and full of fraud. The web is a bigger mess of misinformation and suspect requests for money than it has ever been. There’ll be a big crashing mess when all of this filth floats up to the surface, and people lose faith.
At the moment there’s a lot of people online who just don’t have the skills, and don’t have the critical faculties. Google is one of these collections, they’re in real danger of falling victim to the rot of spamming and ads that don’t work.
As the users of the online world get smarter, and wiser, there will be many big boys biting the dust as the king size skeletons come kicking and screaming out of the cupboard.
Build a sustainable business with real revenues, real cashflow and real profits.
Everything else will fall into place if you do that.
Either by doing real things in the real world, enhanced by digital comms and admin, or perhaps you might just be selling the crazy frog, which hurt my ears in the real world.
do remember that the web is the coolest and most amazing thing in the history of humanity. We’ve built a better mousetrap. This will have more of an impact on our values and wealth than the industrial revolution, for sure.
Well, I will be more sceptical of just about everything. ‘Technologies’, ‘paradigms’, and any kind of promise–from vendors to my own management to McKinsey
consultant predictions of rapid, long term growth of X, Y and Z.
In the last bubble, I took equity in lieu of salary. 1% of nothing is nothing–lesson learned. I put up with terrible behaviour from coworkers and management. This time arround it is about the environment and cold, hard cash.
In the last bubble, I worked as much as 100 hours. It was fun, it was educational…but I didn’t really have much of a life. This time arround it is about balance.
One good thing about the last bubble bursting was that many people who landed a development job (qualified only by a steady pulse and ability to mark X on the dotted line) left.
Sadly, a new bubble means a new generation of hoopleheads searching for digital gold in them there software hills.