Web 2.0; it wasn’t meant to be a version number
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Beta, Applications, Windows, Microsoft on
When Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 for what happened after the dotcom boom and crash (dotcon to dotbomb as the 2001 technology downturn is sometimes known), what he didn’t take into account was the stunningly naive assumptions that people in the technology industry are prone to make.
Web 2.0 was a name for the principle that the companies that survived the crash were the ones that had learned to use the Web as a platform. That’s not just Google Docs and Zoho building Web applications that I personally compare to Microsoft Works or at best Excel circa 1998; it’s Amazon and eBay and sites that get better because people use them and add information (whether that’s reviews of historical price trends).
Google Docs and OpenOffice give me the same feeling I had when I saw Mono on a stand at Web 2.0 labelled Open Source Innovation; what’s so innovative about recreating something that somebody else already built? Far too much of open source is conscious or unconscious reaction to Microsoft.
That’s understandable when you hear the rather self-satisfied way people like Microsoft’s Stephen Elop refer to Web 2.0, innovation and the role of Microsoft; he said that he’d found moving from Silicon Valley to Seattle not as different as he expected when he left Macromedia because it had the same “huge concentration of people concentrating on fixing problems” and when no-one in the audience agreed that “Microsoft is the most interoperable company in the world” he fired right back “I would argue that’s becoming true.”
Microsoft is working hard on interoperability and standards, and it does have a huge concentration of smart, smart people. But it’s also something of a monoculture. With Windows and Office as a multi-billion dollar revenue stream that’s inevitable. Add to that the number of users (around half of whom pay for Office Elop added) and you have if not a barrier to innovation then at least a brake; innovations that come from Microsoft are going to have been worked out carefully enough that they may no longer be new by the time you get them.
Chatting with a friend who’s planning to move back to Windows from Mac because he’s had too many hardware failures, wants a cheap PC and finds he can do many things on Mac but not write fiction, I urged him to try Windows 7 on the netbook he’s trying out. It’s in beta I told him, but it’s very reliable. There are some drivers that aren’t ready yet, but most things just work (thought I do wish I could persuade someone at Microsoft to slip me a copy of build 7068, say) and the performance is better than XP or Vista. And at this point I thought to myself that if Microsoft were to ship Windows 7 right now, based on the beta plus the improvements I’ve been told are in slightly more recent builds, it would be like Vista - a good product that needs more work from both Microsoft and the ecosystem. This time around, the Windows team is going to hang on until it’s done.
Will we call it innovative when it arrives? Will it be a platform that inspires developers with its potential the way Web 2.0 does? Will it look as cool as Palm’s Web OS - which is also likely to arrive some time between April and September? Windows 7 isn’t a dramatically new idea of what an OS is (and Windows 8 may not be that either), but neither is Web 2.0 (which in many ways grew out of Outlook Web Access, the original Ajax application). Web 2.0 is about discovering how much more you can do with the technology you already have. If Windows 7 can unlock the value in servers and applications and storage that Vista didn’t quite reach, then that should certainly count as innovation.
-Mary
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