The open web (part 2/3)
The ghost of Christmas present
The contrast of the web past with its present shocks me (see part 1). The current web, nigh the current Internet, is so much poorer than it was!
Wait a minute! It can’t be! The Internet has surely evolved.
We can do stuff now that was impossible ten or twenty years ago. We understand much better the medium, what it can do, how it influences life. There are many many more connected people now than before. There is much more money flowing in internet activities.
The Internet is no longer a toy, it is part of the Human collective. How can it be worse? And yet, it is worse in one exceedingly important aspect: expectations, hopes, dreams.
Fewer dreams, more visible horizons were to be expected. It is easier to daydream the destination of the voyage when you have the whole expanse of road ahead, than when you are at the last exit of the highway.
It isn’t just natural landing from the dream land, however. The internet is becoming more rigid than it should.
Nowadays, the feeling is that everything has been already invented. Imagine yourself getting someone excited with the idea of a new site that will connect people to one another in groups of similar minded interests. This will happen:
- Your idea will be catalogued against existing stuff. What is it? Another social network?
- Whichever box your idea was catalogued into, there will be a behemoth that everyone thinks insurmountable: How can you compete with Facebook???
Am I that old? This did not happen in the old days [get off my lawn you pesky brats]. Yahoo! did not stop Altavista, and Altavista did not stop Google from trying their take on search. Hotmail did not stop a zillion free email services from popping like weeds. IRC did not preclude the appearance of ICQ, and ICQ did not prevent AIM from happening and AIM was not, in turn, more than a pebble in the MSN Messenger’s path to dominance. All of these are defunct or on the path to the grave. All of them had, at peak, Facebook-like insurmountable market shares.
Every time a market was proven viable, competitors appeared. And it was good.
And yet, now you have to justify how you’ll take the behemoth in every market. The poster child for this local maximum is AdSense/AdWords. How come Google is making over 90% of its revenue from advertising, and no company is tackling AdSense/AdWords head on. There is a $40 billion reward, and no real competitor.
Yahoo is going round in circles putting lipstick on Flickr and cutting losses on delicious.
AOL, for its decent effort with advertising.com is nowhere near adwords’ worldwide presence and long-tail grabbing.
Why is this stagnation bad for us, consumers, for the Internet, and hence for humanity?
When no company had enough of a foothold for market entry barriers to be effective, there was a large incentive for interoperability. The death toll of the succession of closed instant messaging systems served as a warning sign.
We have tar
We have feathers
We like to party
(by Morris)
When companies get large enough in their markets, the lure of an extractive stance becomes very attractive. What is an extractive stance? It’s a positioning where the effects of the company’s actions hurt the [economic] ecosystem.
Think of an extractive stance as opposed to a collaborative stance, where the efforts of each individual boost the ecosystem as a whole.
Extractive strategies are common in stagnant or dwindling markets, collaborative strategies are common in growing markets.
Both strategies are self-feeding. It should be obvious. If the market grows, collaboration makes it grow further and rewards collaborative behaviour. Conversely, if it shrinks, it rewards extractive stances, causing it to shrink more.
And, after much babbling, the crux of this text. The internet is poorer, because, today, I get the feeling everyone is in extractive mode. Some very visible very public examples:
- Twitter is killing API clients so it can grab more added value;
- Facebook is grabbing more and more value/information from its users;
- Google is killing off open standard based products and all of its new products are closed silos.
[My old man ramblings come to a positive close on part 3]
