Understanding the Web 2.0 Trends

Last week was quite active for me with lot of good discussions and brainstorming sessions in addition to spending an evening at Google office.

• Challenges of delivering news through search
• Continued obsolescence of current backup and recovery strategies
• Improving ROI from infrastructure and storage monitoring initiatives
• Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 extending beyond applications to infrastructure

Note: Your thoughts are welcome on these topics.

The underlying idea loosely connecting all activities appears to be the “2.0” and its influence. And, these observations lead me back to reviewing What is Web 2.0, a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly on understanding the Web 2.0 trends.

… the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models

Operations must become a core competency. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets that their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways.