Is the Internet shrinking now? (part II)

With the HTML 5 / CSS / Javascript trinity the web was quickly becoming the leading computing platform, a place where products and services could be distributed world-wide. Also a publishing platform for the masses. No longer true.

The website had been the atom the the Internet for a decade: You would shop on Amazon, find flights on an airline website, sell on eBay, look for a job on Monster.

Now for many people the Web is Facebook. This where the services are, where their people are hanging around, where their leisure time is spent. This recent article, Facebook wants to be our One True Login, and the habit of using Google Search as a replacement of the URL bar, show that most people don’t get how the Internet works.

Where do you want to live?

And the success of platforms like Facebook is not surprising: it’s a place where people doesn’t feel confused, a curated, safe environment where they can do their stuff. Without messing with URLs, multiple logins and the dangers of the wild Internet.

And developers follow users, because users is where the money is or will be. This leads to a fragmentation, happening now under our eyes.
If you are a start-up or a software developer starting a project, one of the strategic decisions is: On what platform?
A few years back, the answer was evident: Web.
But powerful platforms have emerged: Apple’s iTunes / App Store and Facebook are the most impressive examples. Palm purchase by HP may end up creating a third powerful alternative.

Platforms?

Those platforms bring customers by the millions, take care of the most annoying aspects of web services, like login, marketing, payments, among others. Why would then developers want to open their web shop “in the wild” and fight for visibility, customers, and reputation, if they can have a comfy land inside the walled domain of their Lord?

Therefore, the Internet is now shrinking, not in size, in number of users, but in ambition.
Ambition is heading down for two reasons:
Innovation is more likely to happen in the wild than in walled domains with strict rules to respect. And if those new platforms are draining a big amount of the innovation power, there is less for the Web.

Why does it matter?

For developers, because they are in front of an ineludible strategy decision: What platforms for my products?
For users, because they are giving away their personal information, consuming habits, payment information, time and money to a single vendor.
And bet all your assets on a single vendor is risky.

This is why the Web should ultimately win, because nobody controls it, because it’s multi-vendor by essence, and because you are not tied to a single vendor that ends up controlling you.

Is the Internet shrinking now?

For about one year I feel an “unbalance in the force”. The feeling that a big, long-lasting change has happened, that we have changed cycle:
The Internet is now shrinking. Not in size, in number of users, but in ambition.

The last cycle embraces roughly the last 15 years, and it’s been an amazing journey:
I remember back in 1994, sitting in my university dorm room (or what it my neighbor’s room? I don’t remember owning a PC at that time) and trying the new stuff: Linux with X-windows and a little program called Mosaic to see graphical pages on the “World Wide Web”. Or was it running Windows 95 beta with Netscape 2 ? Or maybe both, I’m not sure.

There were actually very few sites to visit. I remember being told by a friend (there was no portal, no search at that time…) to go to the Louvre website, one of the few to have high-quality pictures. It was amazing.

Porn sites didn’t exist either. To get hot stuff, you had to download text files from Usenet and build images out of them with complex tools like uudecode.

As incredible as it may seem today, you couldn’t search either. Just look at the web archive and you will see that Google did not exist until late 1998.

You couldn’t find stuff. No music. Computers at that time were not powerful enough to decode mp3 music, and did not have enough storage anyway!

So the web at that time was very small, and had very little “functionality” or use for day to day activities.

Fast forward to 2005.
Web 2.0 is all the rage. The Internet has become a marketplace, an application platform, people starts blogging en masse. Wikipedia shows that collaborative efforts can.
Maybe circa 2006-2007 we have witnessed the high-water of the web, ambition-wise.

We never have been so close the see the vision of the 21th century web fulfilled: an universal, open, ubiquitous software and services platform.
Despite impressive efforts, like HTML5 standard, Webkit, Cappuccino, and the demise of poisons like Flash or Internet Explorer 6, the web is under new threats.

Next post will explain why the Internet is shrinking in ambition, and why it matters.

From I to We

There has been a revolution in Aero Quartet.
After 4 years of loneliness, I can now talk about Aero Quartet crew as we: I have just hired Nieves. She is in charge of movie repair operations.

For a one-man-business that has grown slowly over the years, adding a second person comes as a shock: you discover that you have no processes in place, no office hours, no office space, no collaboration tools.
Suddenly, you have new legal liabilities. Worse, your business apps do not “support” the new split-up of tasks, you have to modify them. And having to share the information is a new habit to learn.

Therefore, one should consider hiring the first employee as an important business change, that must be carefully prepared and implemented. The benefits will come down the road, but during a few weeks, be prepared for your daily dose of frustration:

• your business will never be the same again. It’s no longer your “baby”.
• things you were doing routinely will require training. The “rookie” will not have your productivity, at least not in the first weeks.
• paperwork and set-up (see below) will consume a lot of time.

Hiring is really a daunting task here in Europe. Governments say they do their best to ease economic reactivation, with incentives and the like. But honestly, that’s bullshit. We are still in an over-regulated mess. Twentieth century stuff with applications threefold, and don’t forget the company stamp in the corner or we reject it, mandatory yearly office inspections, …

I had to do a ton of paperwork. None of it for free. Set-up costs are important, in particular when you hire the first person. It can work for middle and big organizations, where one-time costs are diluted. But very small operations suffer the full weight (money and time) of this bureaucracy. Not surprising that we have 20% unemployment rate in Spain, if hiring your co-worker is so difficult.

Despite all this, hiring is a turning point for Aero Quartet:
We believe that the movie repair business can scale, and we are taking the first actions to make it happen!

Treasured 2.0 is here!

Several months of work condensed into a 3 MB zip file.
Includes a 90 pages Movie Repair Guide.
Now you have no excuse: If you don’t repair your damaged video files, it’s because you don’t want to.