Web 2.0 Is About Possibilities

I recently read Russell Beattie's Where's the Ambition? post, and I have to agree with his main premise, which is that most Web 2.0 companies are both unambitious and generally uninspiring. I'll go one further, though, and claim that I have a good idea why.

I think the main problem with Web 2.0 is that people are too focused on applying Web 2.0 principles to existing solutions, instead of trying to create solutions that weren't possible before. For instance, there's a big hullaballoo over Zimbra's web-based office productivity suite, but I think it's overrated. Sure, it looks like a great product, and they had to do some innovation to get it online, but really, office suites are not innovation. Zimbra is clearly competing against MS Office, and if your product has a clear competitor, it isn't that innovative.

This is why so many of the Bubble 1.0 companies failed miserably -- they didn't add anything to the mix other than the fact that you were doing X online. Online pet food vs. offline pet food? Who cares. Ebay is a great counterexample, because they really enabled something that wasn't possible before, as did all of the big players who made it through the bubble (and plenty of the smaller players did, too).

Look at the heroes of Web 2.0, and it should be pretty obvious that none of them had competitors when they started. Sure, you could say that Flickr competed with Ofoto, but you'd be silly for saying so, since they had completely different purposes, they just both happened to involve personal pictures. del.icio.us obviously wasn't trying to compete with anything, and 37signals has always prided itself that its software is so much simpler than any potential competitors' that they don't actually compete.

When a space is mature, then it's time to start innovating within that space, by doing things like innovating on smaller features (like Zimbra's deeper integration between the office suite and the back office), but it's much tougher to compete in a mature space, and buzzwords are never enough. It's not only tougher, though, it's stupid. There are so many areas ripe for innovation. As Paul Graham has said, find some part of someone's life that sucks and make it great, and you'll make money. The thing is, there are hundreds of specialized careers in the world, and every one of those careers has some suckage that could be massaged away with a good application. Not every app can be useful to every person, but not every app needs to be. Lawyers have tons of money, spend tons of money, have extremely specialized needs, and are barely targeted at all with online applications. If you started a great web app to help lawyers do their jobs, it's be a good bet that you wouldn't have any competitors. Sexy? No. Lucrative, interesting, and probably actually helping the world out? You betcha.

The whole point of Web 2.0, to me, is that it makes possible things that were previously prohibitively difficult. If you are just using Web 2.0 on things you could do before, then please stop.

My main software product is about server automation and configuration management, but in studying all the innovation online recently, I'm realizing that the real innovation isn't in the automation itself, it's in providing more channels of information between the different servers and between the servers and the sysadmins. Puppet's real innovation will be in combining the semantic information derived from full configuration management with these extra channels and feedback loops to make the data much richer. You won't need to mine the data produced by your systems, because it will be labeled at the get-go.

Who is this product competing with? Well, the configuration management part is competing with cfengine, but it's not competing with anyone on the back end. Literally, there is no one trying to take the intent behind your configurations and carry that intent along the entire feedback loop. Instead, there are all these companies that take your intent, use it to produce a system, take the system's output, and try to mine your intent back out. That's just stupid. Why not close the loop in the middle, and avoid the whole mining part in the first place?

This has become Puppet's goal, even if it's taking me some time to make that transition.

Thu, 04 May 2006 | Tags: design