Marketing Ninja

The New Year is here and a number of the Web 2.0 blogs have looked at the highs and lows from 2007, but I want to focus on the tech frontier and what’s coming down the pike for Web 2.0.

1. Google Sees Failure for the First Time

According to Yahoo! Finance, GOOG is sitting comfortably at around $690.50 as I am writing this post. I have written before about how Google is making moves to become the world’s most powerful advertising network and how it’s building/acquiring more content-oriented services in order to create more AdSense real estate and I have no doubt that the expansion of AdSense will be Google’s breadwinner for the next calendar year. However, I am also sure of the following things:

• Google will incur consumer backlash and damage its public image, either by placing its own products at the top of Google search results and damaging the businesses that depend on Google search results or by violating the privacy of its customers for profit;
• Google’s acquisitions strategy will be publicly called into question if Google continues to make more dubious acquisitions (Jaiku, anyone?);
• Google Android will either piss veteran mobile developers off or open up mobile devices to a whole new generation of developers who have never done mobile development before;
• OpenSocial will fall flat on its ass if development doesn’t show some progress soon; it’s been two months since the announcement and Google has yet to produce any substantial developments; and
• Google Knol will not work.

I don’t know what source Google’s "fail" will come from, given how many pies Google has its fingers in, but it’s going to happen in 2008.

2. Yahoo! Starts Selling off Assets

Yahoo! is a company in full tailspin. Fortunately for Yahoo!, it still has more traffic than Google and Yahoo! mail still leads over Gmail; that’s where the good news ends. Yahoo’s strategy has been both confusing and unsuccessful; most of their deviations from their core services have been disasters.

Yahoo! had seven different web properties enter the TechCrunch Deadpool in 2007, three of which occurred in the month of May alone. Some of Yahoo’s new services, like BravoNation, should have never seen the light of day. Mike Arrington said the following about Yahoo’s "Brickhouse," the unit that produced BravoNation:

The point of Brickhouse (I think) is to come up with half baked ideas, throw them against the wall, and see what sticks. That means they shouldn’t launch bland, safe products. Instead, they go a little crazy, and probably expect a high failure rate.

One TechCrunch reader said:

[Brickhouse] basically creates start-ups within Yahoo!. If something is successful – whatever that means – they give it more resources and “acquire” it, just that they don’t have to spend billions on the projects like they would have to with Facebook et al.

Let me translate this: it means that Yahoo! has no strategy; they don’t know what the hell they’re doing; they’re spending money like crazy; and they’re praying that God strikes lightning upon one of their startups and creates the next YouTube. This is not the strategy of a brilliant company; this is the strategy of a company that is awash in cash (for the moment) but has no idea how to stay ahead of its competition.

My prediction? Yahoo starts selling off its assets and focusing on its core services. Yahoo should focus on expanding its advertising network (YPN) to compete with AdSense and it should focus on competing with Google search.

3. Microsoft Moves to Buyout Yahoo!; Starts Seriously Competing with Google in Online Search

I’ve already established that Yahoo! is on the decline, but the second half of my bold prediction for Yahoo! is that it ultimately ends up in the hands of Microsoft. The breakdown of search engine popularity of roughly Google 55%, Yahoo 20%, Live Search 14%.

Live Search can’t realistically compete with Google given that its service isn’t fundamentally better or more compelling than Google’s (in fact a recent study shows that Google is still the best at satisfying user queries), thus Microsoft needs to get its users from somewhere; why not buy out the falling star of online search, Yahoo? Or perhaps Microsoft will use its terrific desktop search platform to help expand Live Search online?

There is no reason for Microsoft not to buy out Yahoo, and I predict that Microsoft will begin positioning itself to acquire Yahoo in 2008.

4. Social Media Penetrates Mainstream Consciousness

In 2008 services like StumbleUpon and del.iciou.us will begin to penetrate the mainstream consciousness and will become commonplace names. "But aren’t they already commonplace?" you ask. The answers is "yes, those services are household names among techies like us," but those services have not captured the imaginations of average Americans in the same way Facebook has.

One of the points that I try to drive home in almost every post I write is that there is a huge technological literacy gap between the average person and the average person in Silicon Valley; one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is a black hole for so many millions of venture capital dollars is because people in SV drink their own Kool-Aid all too often.

Regardless, my prediction is that StumbleUpon and del.icio.us in particular will make waves in 2008 and will become household names for a lot of average users.

5. Ruby on Rails Starts to Die a Slow, Agonizing Death

I got great pleasure out of reading Zed Shaw’s "Rails is a Ghetto" rant this morning, and I took it as a sign that the RoR fad may finally be over. Zed’s post made me thankful that Microsoft handles all of the testing and development for ASP.NET; specifically:

I believe, if I could point at one thing it’s the following statement on 2007-01-20 to me by David H. creator of Rails:

(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day
(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10
(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice
(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right?

Notice how it took me a few seconds to reply. This one single statement basically means that we all got duped. The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average.

[...]

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Could you imagine how much crap Microsoft would catch if one Scott Guthrie’s ASP.NET applications had to restart 400 times a day?

I’ve always been annoyed by the RoR community, kind of like how I was annoyed by the ColdFusion community when I was first learning classic ASP. When I read about a hot, new technology that isn’t even thread-safe, I groan, roll my eyes, and say "oh God not this, again." There’s more mouth than substance behind it, and the promise of RoR is quickly falling apart. The RoR honeymoon is over, and I predict the start of a slow, agonizing death for RoR in 2008.

6. Social Networking Clearinghouse

2007 was the "Year of Facebook" and as a result, every jack-ass with an MBA thought it would be a good idea to start his or her own social network. 2008 will be the year that pissed off angel investors scream "show me the money" and those same MBA types go running over the cliffs like a pack of lemmings hunting for the next bandwagon / investment sinkhole.

The Social Networking bubble is going to burst and only the major players will be left standing; weaklings, like Bebo, aren’t going to make it. The "we do what Facebook does minus being evil" clones aren’t going to make it, either.

2008 won’t be a year of "failure" for social networks; rather it will be a year of failure for social networks with poor business propositions. Simply having a "social network" won’t be enough to guarantee interested users or investors; in 2008, new startups seeking to utilize a social network in their web applications will have to demonstrate innovation and reasoning behind creating an entirely new social network rather than leverage existing ones via APIs.

7. Increase in "Cloud-Computing" Buzz

One of Eric Schmidt’s hopes and dreams for Google is to use Cloud Computing to create the next wave of productivity applications, i.e. Google Docs, GMail, Google Calendars, etc… The basic principle behind Cloud Computing is to move basic computation away from personal computers to amorphous "clouds" of computational power, namely large server farms that are professionally managed by organizations like Google and Amazon.

The biggest splash in the Cloud Computing pond this year was Amazon’s SimpleDB Web Service, which had a lot of bloggers asking "is this the end of MySQL/MSSQL/Oracle?" As organizations begin to spawn more Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, the hype for Cloud Computing will only continue, especially when services such as Amazon’s SimpleDB and EC2 become more popular in Silicon Valley. I predict that in 2008 we will see a lot more hype around "Cloud Computing," but whether or not we see anything revolutionary come out of Cloud Computing is anybody’s guess.

Note: Amazon announced their new DevPay service today, which enables developers to monetize their web service usage. Given that this news was announced in 2008, I’d say it’s a good indicator that prediction number 7 is going to become true

8. The Internet Establishes itself as the Conversation Leader of the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

While I’m sure there are people who believe that the Internet has done this already (Ron Paul supporters), I predict that the Internet will be the number one source of buzz surrounding the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election.

Dan Rather, Brian Williams, and Katie Couric will be maneuvering their shows around "what’s being said on the Internet" rather than the Internet maneuvering itself around "what was said on television." My reasoning for this?

Memogate. It was the first time that the blogosphere stepped into Presidential politics and precipitated actionable consequences, which in this case was the dismissal of Dan Rather from the CBS network.

If you want to do more reading up on Memogate then I suggest you read the first heading of my article from August, Blogging for Business: Blogs are not just a fad.

I predict that in 2008, Internet-based sources will be the conversation leaders in a Presidential Election.

Lingering Questions for 2008

I’m going to toss these questions up to my readers, because frankly I don’t have any particular inclinations toward their answers. Here are my lingering questions for the upcoming year?

• What’s going to happen to Digg? Is it going to fall apart? Is it going to be fine? Will it get sold?
• Will Facebook "show us the money" in 2008? Is Zuckerberg going to stay in the driver’s seat or will Facebook find its own Eric Schmidt?
• ASP.NET & .NET 3.5 – Are developers going to start thanking Microsoft or are we going to grumble and start rewriting our applications?
• OpenSocial vs. F8 – If OpenSocial ever gets off the ground, will there be any serious platform competition? Speaking of which, will we see some useful productivity/contact management applications in 2008?

We’ll take a look in one year and see how right I am if I am right at all

 

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